Charles Le Brun (1619 - 1690), d'après - Fontaine des Muses

Beautiful impression on laid paper with a watermark and wide margins and a tear outside the line of the plate mark. It presents a fold on the upper right side. The scene shows Apollo playing the lyre at the center of a rock fountain, surrounded by the Muses, with at his feet the gods and the river nymphs, the Naiads. The drawing represents the union of art and nature through the allegorical depiction of Mount Parnassus and the springs which, like artistic and poetic inspiration, flow from the summit of the mountain, like the water of the fountain at the center of the arch of rock. The original drawing was conceived by Charles Le Brun around 1665–1668 on commission of the provost of the merchants of Paris for the new city fountains, a project that was never translated into stone but which ended up in a collection of engravings published in the late seventeenth century.