Musée du Grand Siècle acquires ‘Allegory of the Tiber’
The oil painting, jointly attributed to Charles Le Brun and Gaspard Dughet, is intended for the Saint-Cloud museum scheduled to open in 2028.
The Musée du Grand Siècle has acquired ‘Allegory of the Tiber’, an oil on canvas jointly attributed to Charles Le Brun and Gaspard Dughet, La Tribune de l’Art reports. The museum is scheduled to open in Saint-Cloud in 2028.
Dated c. 1642-1645, the painting measures 74 x 94.5 cm. It shows the river as a reclining old man within a landscape. According to La Tribune de l’Art, early biographers assigned the landscape element to Dughet, while the picture was made in collaboration with Le Brun before the latter left Rome to pursue his career in France.
The same report says that the reclining river god drew on an antique sculpture then held at the Vatican and now in the Louvre. That proposed artistic source is reported rather than independently established by the supplied material.
The painting was included in the 2016 retrospective devoted to Le Brun and then belonged to Galerie Leegenhoek, according to La Tribune de l’Art. That earlier ownership does not identify the museum’s present seller. The supplied report gives no purchase price, intermediary, earlier sale record or fuller provenance.
