A Landscape with the Flight into Egypt

A Landscape with the Flight into Egypt combines two traditions: the devotional subject of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Christ fleeing Herod's massacre into Egypt, and the autonomous Baroque landscape that had developed in the hands of Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and their Dutch and Flemish contemporaries. Noël Coypel's engagement with this hybrid genre reflects the mid-seventeenth-century French tradition of situating sacred narrative within richly observed natural settings. The 1630 date given is likely a misdating — Coypel was born in 1628, making a 1630 work virtually impossible; the date may refer to a copy, a date of acquisition, or a cataloguing error. The work is held by the National Trust in Britain, which preserves significant European Old Master holdings across its country house collections. Flight into Egypt landscapes were favoured by aristocratic collectors as devotional images that were also aesthetically pleasing as naturalistic scenes — the sacred figures often quite small within an expansive natural vista, in the manner of Claude.

Oil on canvas in the Italianate landscape mode that French painters absorbed from Claude Lorrain and Poussin's example. Warm, golden afternoon light — the characteristic hallmark of the French Italianate landscape — bathes a carefully structured natural scene with atmospheric perspective softening distant hills and trees. The Holy Family would appear as relatively small figures within the landscape, consistent with the genre's emphasis on nature as the primary subject.