The Assumption of the Virgin

Henri d'Étampes-Valençay arrived in Rome as the new French ambassador on 4 July 1649, and he commissioned this from Poussin. By 20 January 1650 it was finished and in his hands. Poussin reported the handover two days later in a letter to his friend in Paris, the collector Paul Fréart de Chantelou. The Virgin rises on a cloud, borne up by angels, above a low landscape with a small town on the horizon. For the support Poussin chose something he used nowhere else, a very fine silk dyed blue with indigo. That blue still shows in the shadows, which he painted with a very light touch. The ambassador's secretary, Séraphin de Mauroy, later owned the picture and kept it in the private chapel of his Paris house, behind a curtain of red taffeta.