About the work

Jacob Landau was commissioned to make Baroque Apotheosis by Epic Records to serve as the cover art of The Hewitt Chamber Orchestra’s recording of L’Apotheose de Lully by Francois Couperin.

That piece of music is quite interesting; Couperin wrote it in 1725 to immortalize the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. Lully was Italian but became part of Louis XIV and eventually became a French citizen. He disclaimed any Italian influence in his work—voicing the competition and division between musicians of both countries. But Couperin took a different view, and used L’Apotheosis to honor Lully and to simultaneously try to break down the division between musics of both nations. Maurice Hewitt, who was trained in the violin in Paris, was a member of the French Resistance during World War II. He was captured and survived Buchenwald—founding a string quartet with Czech nationals—and after the war resumed his music career. Landau’s illustration for the Couperin work reflects the lofty place Couperin ascribe to Lully in musical history.

The Landau catalogue raisonné published in 1982 by the New Jersey State Museum reports that this work was used for the album cover, reproduced twice (see Bibliography), and never published. However, there are copies in the marketplace from an edition of 50. It is unlikely that the catalogue raisonné, prepared with Landau’s assistance, would be incorrect, but equally unclear from where come the copies in circulation. In any case, this work is one of the rare artist’s proofs from Landau’s 1957 woodcut.

This work is very handsomely conservation framed to museum standards in an aluminum frame of the sort invented by framemaker Robert Kulicke with a brown-black enamel finish.