This painting would appear to be a high-quality workshop version of La Hyre's prime canvas, today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 1).¹ That work was originally flanked by two depictions of putti, respectively holding a viol and a piece of music (Musée Magnin, Dijon), all of which formed part of a series of allegorical figures representing the Seven Liberal Arts, commissioned by Gédéon Tallemant (1613-68), a member of the Council of State, for his house on rue d’Angoûlmois, in the Marais quarter of Paris. The other canvases, which are all dated 1649 or 1650, depict the Trivium: Grammar (National Gallery, London), Rhetoric (known from a copy in a private collects ion) and Dialectic (private collects ion), and the Quadrivium: Arit.mes tic (Foundation Hannema-de Stuers, Heino), Geometry ( Replica Handbags s Museums of San Francisco), Astronomy (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans) and Music. All the figures are shown half-length, wearing classical drapery, set before architectural elements, each identifiable through their particular attributes.

The figure of Music is depicted tuning a theorbo (or angelica) - a metaphor for harmony - while on the table before her lie a lute, a violin, flageolets (or recorders), and an open book of music, behind all of which the pipes of an organ are visible. Many of these elements, as well as the nightingale perched on the back of the figure's chair, are included in Cesare Ripa's iconographic manual, the Iconologia, which seems to have served as a source of inspiration for La Hyre's series. In the present painting, as in the picture in New York, three pieces of music are visible in the open manuscript, including a two-part song which, in the original, is inscribed with a first line of text that reads 'C'est a ce coup...' ('It is with this drink...').

The Allegory of Music in the Metropolitan Museum is perhaps the finest of the original series, which was painted at the height of La Hyre's career, when his elegant, classicising style and harmonious use of rich colour was fully developed, and by which t.mes he was also supported by a workshop. The variation in quality among the canvases which make up that series points to the participation of assistants in the commission, and the present painting likewise appears to be a workshop production. A relatively early source from 1745 describes a set of Liberal Arts by La Hyre painted for a patron in Rouen,² and the existence of at least one other series is further attested to by the existence of duplicate versions of the allegories of Arit.mes tic and Grammar in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.³ It seems likely, therefore, that this painting must also once have formed part of an additional set.⁴

¹ https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collects ion/search/436836

² A.J. Dézallier d'Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, avec leurs portraits gravés en taille-douce..., vol. 2, Paris 1745, p. 274 ('sept grands tableaux représentant les sept arts libéraux avec des fonds enrichis d'architecture pour la même ville [Rouen]').

³ https://art.thewalters.org/detail/31752/allegory-of-grammar/ ; and https://art.thewalters.org/detail/19242/allegory-of-arit.mes tic/

⁴ In their seminal exhibition catalogue, which discusses the series as a whole: Laurent de La Hyre, 1606–1656: L'homme et l'oeuvre, exh. cat., Geneva 1988, pp. 292-302, Pierre Rosenberg and Jacques Thuillier contest the idea that there was ever necessarily another homogenous set, and consider the two Baltimore paintings, mentioned above, as copies (see pp. 292-93).