Attributed to Louis Le Nain

This entry is not a person. It stands for the Louvre's 'attributed to Louis Le Nain', a label the museum uses for the Allegory of Victory, a winged figure in a plumed helmet standing over a fallen man. The words mean the curators see Louis's hand in it but stop short of certainty.

The signature cannot settle it. The canvas is signed 'Lenain fecit', Le Nain made this, and three brothers from Laon, Antoine, Louis and Mathieu, shared that name and a studio in Paris. For a long time the Victory was given to Mathieu, the youngest. The Louvre's current catalogue moves it to Louis, pointing to the broadly brushed landscape, the part of painting in which Louis is thought the strongest of the three, and to the Victory's face and hand, of the same type as Ariadne's in a Bacchus and Ariadne at the museum in Orléans. The Louvre dates both pictures to around 1635.