Venus, Mars and Cupid

watermark: none

…; collection William Bates (1824-1884), Birmingham; …; ? sale, London (Sotheby's), 19 January 1887 sqq; …; sale, S.H. de la Sablonière (1825-88, Kampen) and C. Ekama (1824-91, Haarlem), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 30 June 1891, no. 141 (‘Jan van Loenen. Mars, Vénus et l'Amour. Plume et lavis. Signé: ‘Jan van Loenen fecit 1621’ (Manière de Saenredam). - H. 18, L. 14 cent.’), fl. 2.50, to William Pitcairn Knowles (1820-94), Rotterdam and Wiesbaden (L. 2643);¹¹Copy RKD. his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 25-26 June 1895, no. 400, fl. 3, to the Vereniging Rembrandt;²²Copy RKD. from whom, fl. 3.45, to the museum, 1899

ObjectNumber: RP-T-1899-A-4296

The Jan van Loenen who signed this drawing is very probably the Johan Cornelisz van Loenen who worked in Grenoble for many years, before returning to his native Utrecht in 1634. In 1621, the year that he dated this drawing, he applied to the city authorities of Grenoble for tax exemption because he had been away for several years. Mars, Venus and Cupid – a rather clumsy effort in a Late Mannerist idiom – is the only known drawing by this minor master. Van Loenen was not a very good inventor: not only is the god of war legless, but the table is too, leaving it floating eerily in space.

Such details are normally telltale signs of a copy. Indeed, the drawing is directly based on the group of Mars, Venus and Cupid that forms the centrepiece of a composition by Joachim Wtewael (1566-1638), the Wedding of Peleus and Thetis, known in several drawn and painted versions. Van Loenen’s drawing was previously linked with two painted versions on copper – both regarded as autograph and dated by Wtewael expert Lowenthal between 1606 and 1610 – one previously in the collection of Mr and Mrs Saul P. Steinberg, New York, which was sold privately in 2000 through the New York dealer Richard Feigen,⁸⁸A. Lowenthal, Joachim Wtewael and Dutch Mannerism, Doornspijk 1986, pp. 123-24, no. A-49, fig. 70, and colour pl. XV. and the other in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy (inv. no. 1379).⁹⁹Ibid., no. A-50, fig. 71. As Schapelhouman noted in 1998, however, there are minor differences between both of these painted models and the drawing. This led him to assume that Van Loenen probably drew the figure group from memory rather than copying it directly.¹⁰¹⁰In both paintings, for instance, Mars is seated beside Venus, but Van Loenen represented him standing behind her chair, although he forgot to add his legs. Venus’s pose is also different: in these paintings she is turned away from her lover, but in the drawing she is looking up at him.

There are no such discrepancies in two other versions of the theme by Wtewael, a drawing in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig (inv. no. Z 264 ).¹¹¹¹Ibid., no. A-30, fig. 43. The RKD text for this drawing incorrectly states that it is based on a panel painting of the subject by Wtewael, signed and dated 1610, in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (inv. no. 62 058) and another oil on copper, dated 1612, now in the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (inv. no. 1991.9), which was unknown at the time of Lowenthal’s monograph on Wtewael.¹²¹²Sale, London (Sotheby’s), 11 April 1990, no. 19; Christopher Brown, Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age, exh. cat. San Francisco (Fine Arts Museums)/Baltimore (Walters Art Gallery)/London (National Gallery) 1997-98, no. 49. The Rijksmuseum drawing is almost certainly derived from the Williamstown painting, with its identically posed figures, an identical chair, a legless table, and even similar still-life elements on the table.¹³¹³A less likely possible prototype is a copy of the Clark painting, which passed through the salerooms as ‘circle of Wtewael’, London (Bonhams), 8 July 2015, no. 71 (https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/22644/lot/71/). The drapery repoussoir at upper right of the Amsterdam copy is Van Loenen’s own invention, creating a vague setting for the figure group he extracted from Wtewael’s composition.

Marijn Schapelhouman, 1998/Jane Shoaf Turner, 2020

U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXIII (1929), pp. 321-22; Flandre et Hollande an Siècle d'Or: Chefs-d'ceuvre des Musées de Rhéme-Alpes, exh. cat. Lyons (Musée des Beaux-Arts)/Bourg-en-Bresse (Musée de Brou)/Roanne (Musée Déchelette) 1992, p. 34

M. Schapelhouman, 1998/J. Turner, 2020, 'Jan Cornelisz. van Loenen, Venus, Mars and Cupid, 1621', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.54763