Study for the Funeral of Pallas ca. 1716–17 Antoine Coypel French Steeped in honors and titles, Antoine Coypel was a precocious talent from a family of successful painters. He was named first painter to the duc d’Orléans in 1688, director of the Académie Royale in 1714, and First Painter to the king in 1715. His most influential large scale project was undoubtedly the decoration of the Grande Galerie of the Palais Royal in Paris which had as its theme the story of Aeneas. Commissioned in 1701 by Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, the future Regent, the ceiling was completed by 1705, and seven large c

Study for the Funeral of Pallas ca. 1716–17 Antoine Coypel French Steeped in honors and titles, Antoine Coypel was a precocious talent from a family of successful painters. He was named first painter to the duc d’Orléans in 1688, director of the Académie Royale in 1714, and First Painter to the king in 1715. His most influential large scale project was undoubtedly the decoration of the Grande Galerie of the Palais Royal in Paris which had as its theme the story of Aeneas. Commissioned in 1701 by Philippe II, duc d’Orléans, the future Regent, the ceiling was completed by 1705, and seven large canvases depicting central moments of the Aeneid were added to the side walls between 1715-17. Many of the canvases are today in poor states of preservation, but the vigor and beauty of Coypel’s decoration, which earned him so many accolades in his own day, can today be appreciated in the quality of the surviving preparatory drawings. The Met’s sheet first appeared on the New York art market in 2011. It is an energetic and exploratory compositional study for The Funeral of Pallas, (Musée du Louvre, Paris), one of Coypel’s scenes for the decoration of the Palais Royal. It represents a subject from book X of Virgil’s Aeneid, when the body of Pallas is returned to his father Evander, king of the Arcadians. Pallas had gone with Aeneas to fight the Rutuli and lost his life on the battlefield at the hands of Turnus. Coypel depicts the moment when Evander meets the procession returning the body and grieves over the loss of his son. Eight studies of individual figures or heads relating to the subject are in the Louvre (see Garnier, 1989, nos. 531-38, , figs. 448-455), but this is the first study of the entire composition to come to light. Working with impressive speed and dexterity, Coypel employed a mix of three colors of chalk (red, black, and white) on blue paper to block in the major elements of the composition. He then squared the sheet in blac

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