Eustache Le Sueur

Watermark: mounted down.
In 1647, Claude de Guénégaud, advisor and Treasurer to the young Louis XIV, commissioned the 31 year-old Le Sueur, known as the French Raphael, to create two paintings for his Parisian hôtel particulier, choosing rare but edifying episodes of Roman history narrated by Livy.
This preparatory study depicts Lucius Albinius, a Roman plebeian who, while Rome was besieged by the Gauls in 390 BC, encountered the Vestal Virgins trying to save the Sacred fire from the Barbarians. Taking his children and his tearful wife off his cart and ceding it to the Vestals, he virtuously sacrificed his family for the good of the State. The political message, in Louis XIV's Treasurer's house, was obvious.
Although the painting has been lost, the clear and structured composition and the vocabulary of Greco-Roman antiquity demonstrate the profound influence of Poussin, whose Seven Sacraments were in Paris at that time. Le Sueur, as a leading member of the Parisian artistic elite, became one of the twelve Ancients who founded the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1648, a year after completing this drawing.