GÉRARD DE LAIRESSE
(Liege 1641 – 1711 Amsterdam)

Venus Wounding Cupid with His Own Arrow

Signed with monogram and dated, lower right: GL / 1666

Oil on canvas
41 ¼ x 51 inches (105 x 130 cm)

Provenance:

(Possibly) Van Quiryn van Stryen, Secretaris sale, Haarlem, 2 April 1715, lot 1 (“Venus met Cupido, heerlyk geschildert door Gerard de Lairesse).

(Possibly) Philip van Dyk, sale, The Hague, 1 June 1753, lot 56.

(Possibly) Willem van Haansbergen, sale, The Hague, 19 July 1755, lot 61 (“Een dito [fraay Stuk], zynde Venus met Cupido, zeer fraay door Gerard de Lairesse”).

(Possibly) Anonymous sale; Rotterdam, 28 June 1756, lot 49 (“Een Venus en Cupido, zeer fraay, door Gerard de Lairesse, hoog 2 voet, 10 duim, breet 3 voet 9 duim”).[i]

Collection of Monte Muro, Austria and Mexico (?) (according to a fragmentary inscription on the reverse of the canvas before relining. Now lost).

Private Collection, Mexico, ca. 1900[ii]

Stetson Collection, likely John B. Stetson, DeLand, Florida;2 by descent to:

Van Horn Collection, Florida

Julian Scott, Plainville, New Jersey, until 1901

Dr. Julian Paul Linke, Plainville, New Jersey; from whom acquired in 1957–1958 by:

Richard Castellane, New York City and Munnsville, New York, 1958–2013.

Exhibited:

“In Celebration: Works of Art from the Collections of Princeton Alumni and Friends of the Art Museum,” Princeton University Art Museum, 1997, no. 164.

“Eindelijk De Lairesse: Klassieke Schoonheid in the Gouden Eeuw,” Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, The Netherlands, 10 September 2016 – 22 January 2017, no. 69.

Literature:

Eindelijk! De Lairesse: klassieke schoonheid in de Gouden Eeuw, ed. Josien Beltman, Paul Knolle, Quirine van der Meer Mohr, Zwolle, 2016, pp. 141, 162, cat. no. 69.

Gérard de Lairesse was the second son of the painter Renier de Lairesse (1597–1667), from whom the young Gérard probably received his first training as an artist. His earliest commissioned paintings reveal the powerful influence of the contemporary Liegeois artist Bertholet Flémal, from whose immediate example Lairesse acquired a taste for Classical architectural settings, gestural language, atmospheric lighting, and bold coloring. It was through Flémal that Lairesse came to know the works of the Italian High Renaissance masters—Raphael and Correggio in particular—from whom his style seems to derive. After leaving Liège, Lairesse spent a brief time in both Hertogenbosch and Utrecht before moving to Amsterdam, where he was granted citizenship in 1667 and later served as the city’s official painter. Lairesse rapidly became successful and executed many paintings and engravings for prestigious collectors. He rejected the naturalistic style of Dutch art and instead produced works of a theatrical nature, classical in both subject matter and composition, which ultimately earned him the appellation of the “Dutch Raphael” and the “Dutch Poussin.”

Lairesse’s life and artistic career were marked by both his misadventures and his disability. While he achieved success from an early age, receiving important ecclesiastic and civic commissions while still in his twenties, Lairesse’s amorous involvement with two of his models—a pair of sisters—ended tumultuously and forced him to flee Liège. He married Marie Salme in 1664, and they settled in Amsterdam. Lairesse was immediately attracted to Rembrandt and sat for a portrait by the aging master. This compelling picture, dated 1665, sympathetically portrays the young artist, his face already ravaged by the effects of congenital syphilis—visible in his swollen features and bulbous nose (Fig. 1). The degenerative condition would eventually lead to his blindness around 1689–1690, which ended his career as a painter and began his final chapter as an art theorist. Always a teacher and lecturer on art, Lairesse devoted his remaining years to the codification of his views on painting. His lectures were compiled by his sons into two publications—Grondlegginge der teekenkunst (“Principles of design”) of 1701, followed by the larger Het groot schilderboek (“Great book of painters”) of 1707, which was issued in several editions and played a significant role in the spread of Neoclassicism. Although his activity as a painter had essentially ended by 1690, Lairesse is considered the most important of the Dutch academic classicists. His fame, moreover, is dual, since through his literary career he became the most influential Dutch write on art theory of his time.

Gérard de Lairesse’s Venus and Amor is an important addition to the known work of the artist. Painted in the year after Rembrandt’s portrait and the year prior becoming a citizen of Amsterdam, the present work is newly dated to 1666 following the discovery of the artist’s monogram and date that emerged from the recent conservation treatment. In this period Lairesse began to simplify his compositions by portraying weighty figures evocative of ancient statues that were oftentimes located within architectural settings, as we find here. Venus and Amor presents a dramatic and unusual portrayal of a subject of significant visual interest. With its sophisticated chromatic scheme of muted flesh tones set off by brilliant passages of drapery and ornament, the painting yields an image at once sensuous, decorative, and challenging. The goddess of love is depicted at left seated before an open window, through which a bucranium-decorated architectural element appears. Venus wears a somewhat disheveled dress that is open to reveal part of her breast and a gold heart-shaped pendant emblematic of her aegis. With her right hand she threatens Cupid with one of his arrows. He flees to the right, his quiver spilling its contents in his hasty departure.

While the protagonists of Lairesse’s work are hardly uncommon in paintings of mythological subjects, this particular treatment is unusual if not unique. Cupid is shown not in his role as the instigator of love, but rather as the unwilling recipient of one of his own arrows. That Venus, herself often the target of Cupid’s darts, now threatens the child provides a witty reversal of the familiar theme. Our painting has no exact visual precedent in Dutch painting, but several parallel subjects are known. The work is perhaps a variation on the theme of Venus Chastising Cupid. Whereas in these scenes Venus usually threatens to whip (an often-blindfolded) Cupid, such as in Jan van Bylert’s depiction of the theme (Fig. 2), here Lairesse playfully turns Cupid’s weapon against him in the hands of his mother. Lairesse treated a related subject in his engraving of Venus and Amor at the Forge of Vulcan (Fig. 3), in which a similarly undressed Venus is seen removing an arrow from the quiver of Amor. The strongest iconographic precedent, however, comes from Italy in Agnolo Bronzino’s Allegory of ca. 1545 in the National Gallery, London. Although the full significance of Bronzino’s painting remains the object of much scholarly debate, the central subject does seem to represent Venus’s theft of an arrow from Cupid for imminent use against him.[iii]

Prior to the painting’s being published and exhibited in the last few decades, Lairesse’s authorship of the painting was confirmed by Dr. J.J.M. Timmers—one of the leading authorities on the artist.[iv] Previously the painting had been thought to date from the period 1668–1670 on stylistic grounds. The emergence of the monogram and the date has shed new light on the place of this painting within Lairesse’s career. It is clear that our painting anticipates the figural types that became the standard of the artist’s Amsterdam period. Our Venus and Cupid find striking parallels in the Selene and Endymion in the Rijksmuseum (Fig. 4), particularly in the monumental yet intimate composition that relates them. Lairesse’s Judgment of Paris and Judgment of Midas in the Collection Lord Methuen, Corsham Court, employs the same Venus type, there utilized in a more restrained, almost processional representation. Perhaps closest of all is Lairesse’s Venus Presenting Arms to Aeneas of 1668 in the Museum Mayer van den Bergh in Antwerp (Fig. 5). Here it is clear that the artist is employing not only similar figural types, but the same model for Venus. This woman, likely the artist’s wife Marie Salme, appears at various, more advanced ages in later works by Lairesse.

A variant treatment of the composition is known—formerly in the Flatter Collection and later on the French art market in 1990 (Fig. 6).[v] In this painting the same model appears as Venus, somewhat older in appearance, but more fully revealed in her nudity. Additionally, the architectural background is replaced by a landscape setting with a classical statue visible at left in the distance. Lairesse’s mythological paintings were eagerly sought after by collectors and were greatly prized in his own time, as they are today.

[i] Provenance taken from Gérard Hoet, Catalogus of Naamlyst van Schilderyen, ‘s’Gravenhage, vol. 1, 1752, p. 177, and vol. 3 (ed. P. Terwesten, 1770), pp. 130, 150; and Alain Roy, “Quelques Nouvelles oeuvres attribuées à Gérard de Lairesse,” Les Cahiers d’Histoire de l’Art, vol. 2 (2004), p. 130. This provenance is speculative and has not yet been confirmed. Two old labels were formerly attached to the verso of the paintings: one bore the inscription, No. 4 Leyresse (a variant form of the artist’s name); the other, imperfectly preserved read “Appartenant a la Galerie M’ll La Marquis de Las Mansiny.” This collection has of yet not been identified and could possibly refer to the Marquis de Marigny (later Marques de Menars), Directeur des Batiments under Louis XV and as such the administrator of the royal collection.

[ii] Provenance references supplied by former owner Richard Castellane, as related to him by previous owner Julian Linke, but not independently documented.

[iii] https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/bronzino-an-allegory-with-venus-and-cupid.

[iv] Written communication, 1958, and verbal confirmation, 1984.

[v] https://rkd.nl/images/1612. See also: Roy, “Quelques Nouvelles oeuvres attribuées à Gérard de Lairesse,” p. 130, cat. no. P.66 bis, fig. 22.