After Nicolas Poussin, The Assumption of the Virgin, Oil on Canvas Dated 1881, Framed French Religious Painting

The Virgin Carried to Heaven

The Virgin rises on a bank of cloud, arms open, her drapery caught in the same updraft that carries the ring of putti wheeling around her. Below, the empty tomb anchors the composition to the ground the figures are leaving. The vertical thrust, the tumbling angels, the strong diagonal of the mantle — all of it goes straight back to Nicolas Poussin's celebrated Assumption of the Virgin. This canvas is a 19th-century repetition after the master, dated 1881 at the lower left, painted more than two centuries after Poussin's death in 1665. That is exactly what "after Poussin" means and it is the honest label for the work. The copyist held the palette close to the Baroque model: warm golds in the light, deep blue in the Virgin's mantle, grey cloud built up in layers. Some losses to the paint layer, visible in the photos.

Copying the Masters in 19th Century France

Painting a full-scale copy after an Old Master was not a shortcut in the 19th century — it was the backbone of academic training and a respected trade in its own right. The Louvre issued permits to copyists by the hundreds; churches and private chapels commissioned repetitions of famous altarpieces they could never own. A dated copy like this one, made in 1881, tells you someone stood in front of a Poussin composition, or a fine engraving of it, and worked through it inch by inch. For today's collector, a period copy offers the architecture of a great Baroque image — one of the grandest Marian subjects in French painting — at the scale of a private interior, with the age and surface of a genuinely antique canvas.