A Mythological Couple (Venus and Anchises?)

For more than a century this round canvas seems to have changed hands along with a house. It is first recorded in 1672 among the possessions of Marie Particelli, wife of Louis Phélypeaux de La Vrillière, a secretary of state to the French crown, whose mansion was one of the grandest in Paris. It stayed with their heirs until 1705, when it went to Louis Raulin Rouillé, and in 1713 it passed to the count of Toulouse, a son of Louis XIV. Those are, in the same order, the owners of the Hôtel de La Vrillière itself, the building that now houses the Banque de France. The count's son, the duke of Penthièvre, inherited it in 1737, and the painting was seized in the Revolution in 1794.

What it shows is less settled. A man crowned with laurel embraces a red-haired woman in pink who holds a garland. The Louvre suggests Venus and Anchises, the Trojan shepherd the goddess loved, and keeps a question mark. The circle is more than a metre across, and the picture was later transferred to a new canvas.