+ Expand
Artist or Maker: Ferdinand Bol (Dordrecht 1616-1680 Amsterdam)
+ Expand
Provenance: J.M. Wayne by whom bequeathed in 1893 to his son
Henry Wayne.
The Wayne Picture Settlement.
+ Expand
Exhibited: Edinburgh, The National Trust for Scotland, The Georgian House, on loan, 1973-2007.
+ Expand
Notes: PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTION
Despite being on public view since 1973, the existence of the present picture remained unknown to scholars for another decade. Professor Albert Blankert was unaware of it at the time of publication of his monograph on the artist in 1982 and it was only included by Professor Werner Sumowski in his supplementary volume of paintings by the Rembrandt school having first been published in 1983 by Dr Rüdiger Klessmann in his catalogue of the Dutch pictures at Brunswick (loc. cit.). The composition would have been immediately familiar to all by virtue of Bol's well known, large-scale Venus with Mars sleeping (228 x 200 cm.; Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum), in which the figures of Venus and Cupid recur in a similar woodland setting. That picture has been dated by Blankert to 1661-3 (A. Blankert, Ferdinand Bol, Groningen, 1982, p. 102, no. 33). Both Sumowski (loc. cit.) and Blankert (written communication, 2007, on the basis of photographs) concur that the present work is the earlier treatment, and thus the prototype for the Brunswick Venus and Mars.
In place of the reclining Mars and three putti in the left part of the Brunswick picture, Bol here depicts Venus' chariot which, as Blankert has pointed out, is similar to the one that features prominently in Bol's Children in a goat cart of 1654 (Paris, Louvre). The space occupied by a putto trying on Mars's helmet is here taken by two swans harnessed to the chariot. These relate closely, as indeed does the chariot and its parasol, to those in Bol's Venus and Adonis (Graz, Landesmuseum) which must be contemporary with the present work and is dated to circa 1656-1658 by Blankert (Blankert, op. cit., p. 102, no. 30). The present work may also be distinguished from the Venus and Mars by its apparently higher level of refinement and attention to detail. This can partly be explained by its reduced scale, but Bol's rendering of foliage in the foreground, and inclusion of such details as the sandal yet to be tied to Venus' right foot, give the impression of greater delicacy in execution.
We are grateful to Professor Albert Blankert for confirming the attribution on the basis of photographs.
