Warrior Chasing Woman Away from Palace

Style of Gerard de Lairesse · n.d.

Medium

Pen and brown ink with brush and gray wash, heightened with touches of white gouache, on tan laid paper, partially laid down on ivory laid paper

Original size

20.7 × 15.8 cm (8 3/16 × 6 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

"Warrior Chasing Woman Away from Palace" carries the dramatic urgency and classical grandeur that defined the most ambitious draughtsmanship of the late Dutch Golden Age. Gerard de Lairesse was one of the most celebrated painters and theorists of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, admired for fusing the French classical tradition of Poussin with the richness of Flemish figure painting. Works in his style share a theatrical command of the human form — figures frozen at the peak of action, drapery alive with movement, architecture lending weight and consequence to the scene. The original drawing deploys pen and brown ink alongside gray wash and delicate touches of white gouache to build tone and light with remarkable economy, suggesting a mind that understood both the painter's and the printmaker's craft. Lairesse was so highly regarded in his lifetime that Rembrandt himself painted his portrait, a distinction afforded to very few contemporaries. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates the vigour and tonal subtlety of this work onto canvas, preserving the sweep of the composition and the charged tension between figures that makes the original so compelling to stand before.