Dead Adonis

La Hyre painted this dead Adonis around 1628 to 1630, when he was in his early twenties. Adonis, the young hunter loved by Venus, has been killed by a wild boar and lies across the front of the picture on a red cloth, while his dog sits by him at the right. The Louvre connects the picture with Adonis, the long poem by the Italian poet Giambattista Marino published in Paris in 1623, and compares it with a death of Adonis that Nicolas Poussin painted around 1627, now in Caen.

The canvas seems to have stayed in the family. An inventory of his mother's possessions in 1638 lists a dead Adonis, and the inventory drawn up after his own death in 1656 records a canvas of a dead Adonis with his dog. Later the painter's name was lost. When the picture came up at auction in Stockholm in 1994 it was catalogued as the work of Michele Desubleo, a painter from the Spanish Netherlands who worked in Bologna, and the Louvre bought it at that sale.