Sculpted in the round.

When the statuette was registered in the museum’s inventory in 1887, it was under a glass dome, which is now missing.

…; ’s Rijks verzameling van Kunstwerken van Moderne Meesters, Welgelegen Pavilion, Haarlem, by 1844;¹¹Haarlem n.d. [1844], p. 23. transferred to the museum, 1887

Object number: BK-NM-8357

As the most talented apprentice of Laurent Delvaux (1696-1778), Gilles Lambert Godecharle (1750-1835) was sent abroad to complete his training, with a stipend from Charles of Lorraine, the governor of the Austrian Netherlands. He studied at the Académie Royale in Paris with Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714-1785) and worked in the studio of the Antwerp sculptor Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert (1727-1788), travelling in his wake to Berlin in 1775. Then, after a brief stay in London, Godecharle settled in Rome in 1778, where he won the first prize of the Accademia di San Luca in the same year. When he returned to his home country, he carried out several important assignments for the Austrian court from 1780 to 1794, including the pediment of the façade of the palace of the Sovereign Council of Brabant in Brussels (now the Palais de la Nation). The prestige this brought him resulted in many private commissions, among which work for country houses in Belgium and in the Netherlands. For example, the Amsterdam banker Henry Hope (1735-1811) engaged Godecharle to create the façade sculptures for the monumental pavilion Welgelegen he was building in neo-Classical style in Haarlem between 1785 and 1789. Godecharle is the best known Netherlandish representative of the early stage of neo-Classical sculpture.

The marble salon sculpture featured here is a scaled down copy of the renowned ancient Venus with a Shell which has been housed in Paris since the early nineteenth century,²²Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. MR 309, see F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven/London 1981, no. 67; A. Pasquier, ‘La ‘“nymphe à la coquille” de la collection Borghèse’, in Art, objects d’art, collections: Hommage à Hubert Landais: Études sur l’art du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance sur l’histoire du goût et des collections, Paris 1987, pp. 11-15. and was in the Borghese family’s collection in Rome prior to this. The goddess of Love is sitting on a beach, scooping up water with a shell probably with which to wash herself. The popularity of the composition climaxed in the seventeenth century when King Philip IV of Spain ordered a bronze cast of it and Antoine Coysevox (1640-1720) made a very successful variant in marble for Louis XIV.³³Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. MR 1823. The piece continued to appeal to artists in the eighteenth century. For instance, Godecharle’s teacher, Delvaux, made a life-size marble as well as a reduced terracotta replica of it during his stay in Rome (1728-1732).⁴⁴A. Jacobs, Laurent Delvaux (Gand, 1696-Nivelles, 1778), Paris 1999, nos. S 38 and S 39. He took the terracotta with him to Nivelles and eventually it ended up, via his heirs, in the collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels.⁵⁵Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, inv. no. 4014, see E. De Wilde et al., Le Musée caché : A la découverte des réserves/ Het verborgen Museum: Ontdekkingstocht in de reserves, exh. cat. Brussels (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium) 1994, no. 107.

According to the inscription, Godecharle made his Venus with a Shell in 1792 in Brussels. The terracotta version by his master, Delvaux (by then deceased), most probably served as his example (fig. a). The drapery of the chiton worn by the young goddess and the form of the beach, plus the positioning and shapes of the waves and shells, correspond exactly with Delvaux’ version. Moreover, Venus is portrayed with her right leg practically bare, unlike in the original and in most of the copies. Also the size of the two sculptures is almost identical too, i.e. c. 33 centimetres, which is about half the height of the original. The only point on which Godecharle’s version differs from that of his teacher is the standing pitcher, which the latter added behind Venus’ leg, probably to make the composition more balanced.

Nothing can be said with certainty about the early provenance of Godecharle’s statuette. It might possibly be identified with the ‘Venus scooping water with a shell’, which Godecharle submitted to the Brussels Salon in 1816.⁶⁶Notice des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure et dessin, exécutés par des artistes vivans, et exposés au Musée de Bruxelles, Brussels 1816, no. 132. However, since exhibitions of that type were normally organized to display new painting and sculpture and the present work was already 24 years old at the time, it could well have concerned a later replica that the sculptor had made.

The piece featured here was first documented with certainty in the 1844 catalogue of modern and contemporary masters belonging to the Rijksmuseum van Schilderijen,⁷⁷Notice de la collection de tableaux de maitres modernes, au pavillon à Harlem, n.d. (1844), p. 23. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Library. that was located in Welgelegen Pavilion in Haarlem from 1838 onwards. In view of the location, it is reasonable to suggest that Godecharle had made the work for his maecenas Henry Hope and that after he left for England in 1794 it had remained at Welgelegen, together with several other statues from his collection. In 1807 Henry’s foster son, John Williams Hope, acquired the house and sold it a year later to King Louis Napoleon complete with the furniture, ‘and with all the Statues’.⁸⁸benevens alle Standbeelde, see M.H.E. Zoetmulder, ‘Het Paviljoen Welgelegen als woonhuis; Het interieur in de periode 1789-1820’, in F.W.A. Beelaerts van Blokland et al., Paviljoen Welgelegen, 1789-1989: Van buitenplaats van de bankier Hope tot zetel van de provincie Noord-Holland, Haarlem 1989, pp. 65-91, esp. p. 80. They included the lead garden statuary by Francesco Righetti, of which some remaining pieces are now housed in the Rijksmuseum (BK-2006-7 to [-13](/en/collection/ BK-2006-13/catalogue-entry)) and – coincidentally or not – a life-size marble copy by an anonymous sculptor of, once more, the Venus with a Shell.⁹⁹J.W. Niemeijer, ‘De kunstverzameling van John Hope’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 32 (1981), pp. 127-232, esp. p. 209 (no. 371); J. Heijenbrok and G. Steenmeijer, ‘Meer dan Welgelegen: Abraham van der Hart en de familie Hope’, Bulletin KNOB 107 (2008), pp. 194-211, esp. p. 207. Henry Hope’s cousin, John Hope (1737-1784), had purchased this garden statue in 1772 at the sale of the estate of the former Rotterdam councillor, Herman van Coopstad, for his country residence Groenendaal.¹⁰¹⁰Van Daalen mistakenly identified this piece as the sculpture Godecharle had exhibited at the Salon in Brussels in 1816, calling the work in the Rijksmuseum a replica, see P.K. van Daalen, Nederlandse beeldhouwers in de negentiende eeuw, The Hague 1957, p. 12 (note 3). Henry inherited it after his death and then had it transferred to Welgelegen, where it still stands today. Since Godecharle visited Welgelegen various times, he must have known the sculpture. However it is not likely that he based his Venus with a Shell on that work, as neither the positioning nor the form of the shell, nor part of the draping of the clothing correspond exactly, whereas they are identical to the terracotta by his master Delvaux in Brussels.

Bieke van der Mark, 2026

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 430, with earlier literature

B. van der Mark, 2026, 'Gilles Lambert Godecharle, Venus with a Shell, Brussels, 1792', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20017604