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Lot Essay
The Sleep of Venus was a favourite subject of Boucher's in the mid- and late-1730s, just after he had returned to Paris from two years of study in Italy and was setting about establishing for himself an independent career as a painter. It is not clear if Boucher looked to a literary source for his inspiration, but the Roman poet Lucretius, whose book De rerum natura invokes Venus as the goddess of creation and associates the awakening of Venus and Cupid with the coming of Spring, could have offered a validation from classical literature for his vision of antiquity. In the present painting - a langourous version of the subject - Boucher's voluptuous goddess reclines naked on snow-white sheets in her gilded, shell-shaped chariot as it floats suspended in the heavens. Her blonde hair is tressed with pearls; two doves descend from the skies to join her, and her winged son, Cupid, sits alertly at her side, her right hand resting gently on his naked back; his quiver of arrows lies on a red velvet cloth at his mother's feet. A quatrain by François Bernard Lépicié accompanying Michel Guillaume Aubert's engraving after another painting of the same subject by Boucher (formerly Wildenstein & Co., New York; see J. Baillio, op. cit., no. 62) suggests one of the interpretations that the artist's contemporaries would have inferred from such images:
We must always be wary of a beautiful woman/
Even her sleep has its charms/
Cupid is always on guard/
And this god does not slumber
Alexander Ananoff proposed a date of 1739 for the present painting, but a close examination of the picture indicates that it was probably made several years earlier, around 1732-34. In its broader, brushier handling, The Sleep of Venus is closely comparable to the suite of paintings that Boucher executed during that period for his first important Parisian patron, the obscure lawyer François Derbais. Boucher painted his first large-scale masterpieces in the early 1730s for the billiards room in Derbais' townhouse on the rue Poissonnière: a suite of five mythological paintings (including the early masterpieces The Rape of Europa and Mercury Confiding the Infant Bacchus to the Nymphs of Nyssa, both today in the Wallace Collection, London); immediately thereafter he made four decorations of frolicking putti representing the Seasons for Derbais' staircase (including L'amour moissonneur; see lot 51). There is no evidence to connect The Sleep of Venus with Derbais, and nothing is known of its history before the end of the 18th century, but its scale, format and style of execution suggest that it was commissioned as an overdoor for a grand room decoration shortly after Boucher's return to Paris in the early 1730s. The first auction catalogues in which the picture is described stress its vigourous execution and early date. The expert of the Lebas-Courmont sale of 1795 praises its animated handling, comparing 'the colour and touch to [that of Francois] Lemoyne', Boucher's first teacher; nearly a century latter, the cataloguer of the Beurnoville sale states that the painting is made 'in the first manner of the master and has to have been painted around the period of his journey to Italy'. The extraordinary lushness and virtuosity of the painting's execution indicates that the ambitious young artist - who still had a name to make for himself in Paris - was determined to deliver to his as-yet unidentified patron the best work of which he was capable.
Ananoff reproduces several interpretations of the subject of the Sleep of Venus by Boucher, each with the same basic iconography as the present painting but with significant differences in their compositions: a large oval overdoor from the mid-1730s (Ananoff no. 121; 96 x 143 cm.; Musée Jacquemart-Andre, Paris); a small oval cabinet picture, probably also from the mid-'30s (Ananoff no. 124; 43 x 63 cm; Pushkin Museum, Moscow); and an upright oval, painted for Madame de Pompadour and dated 1754 (Ananoff no. 321; 102 x 90 cm.; collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick, Beverly Hills). Joseph Baillio has identified and published (op. cit.) an important, newly discovered Sleep of Venus that, despite its much smaller scale, is closest in style, date and conception to the present work and must also have been made around the time of the Derbais compositions. This beautiful picture was first recorded in the collection of the war hero and publisher Antoine de La Roque; the publication of an engraving of the painting by Aubert was announced in April 1735 in La Roque's journal, the Mercure de France. La Roque's painting depicts a similarly recumbent nude goddess with pearls in her hair and arrows at her feet, though here she reclines in a canopied bedchamber rather than the heavens; however, she does not dream alone - for Cupid, once again at her side, is also asleep. Colin Bailey has shown (see Baillio, op. cit.) that when La Roque's painting (which measures 66.5 x 83.3 cm.) appeared in the sale of his estate, it was incorporated into the headboard of his bed. (The bed was sold with the picture.) Its function probably determined why both Venus and Cupid are depicted asleep and in a bedroom, rather than a celestial setting, but its inclusion in the ornamental scheme of a bedroom may suggest the original purpose and location of Boucher's other depictions of the subject, including the present one.
We are grateful to Alastair Laing for confirming the attribution and for providing additional provenance and literature.
We must always be wary of a beautiful woman/
Even her sleep has its charms/
Cupid is always on guard/
And this god does not slumber
Alexander Ananoff proposed a date of 1739 for the present painting, but a close examination of the picture indicates that it was probably made several years earlier, around 1732-34. In its broader, brushier handling, The Sleep of Venus is closely comparable to the suite of paintings that Boucher executed during that period for his first important Parisian patron, the obscure lawyer François Derbais. Boucher painted his first large-scale masterpieces in the early 1730s for the billiards room in Derbais' townhouse on the rue Poissonnière: a suite of five mythological paintings (including the early masterpieces The Rape of Europa and Mercury Confiding the Infant Bacchus to the Nymphs of Nyssa, both today in the Wallace Collection, London); immediately thereafter he made four decorations of frolicking putti representing the Seasons for Derbais' staircase (including L'amour moissonneur; see lot 51). There is no evidence to connect The Sleep of Venus with Derbais, and nothing is known of its history before the end of the 18th century, but its scale, format and style of execution suggest that it was commissioned as an overdoor for a grand room decoration shortly after Boucher's return to Paris in the early 1730s. The first auction catalogues in which the picture is described stress its vigourous execution and early date. The expert of the Lebas-Courmont sale of 1795 praises its animated handling, comparing 'the colour and touch to [that of Francois] Lemoyne', Boucher's first teacher; nearly a century latter, the cataloguer of the Beurnoville sale states that the painting is made 'in the first manner of the master and has to have been painted around the period of his journey to Italy'. The extraordinary lushness and virtuosity of the painting's execution indicates that the ambitious young artist - who still had a name to make for himself in Paris - was determined to deliver to his as-yet unidentified patron the best work of which he was capable.
Ananoff reproduces several interpretations of the subject of the Sleep of Venus by Boucher, each with the same basic iconography as the present painting but with significant differences in their compositions: a large oval overdoor from the mid-1730s (Ananoff no. 121; 96 x 143 cm.; Musée Jacquemart-Andre, Paris); a small oval cabinet picture, probably also from the mid-'30s (Ananoff no. 124; 43 x 63 cm; Pushkin Museum, Moscow); and an upright oval, painted for Madame de Pompadour and dated 1754 (Ananoff no. 321; 102 x 90 cm.; collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick, Beverly Hills). Joseph Baillio has identified and published (op. cit.) an important, newly discovered Sleep of Venus that, despite its much smaller scale, is closest in style, date and conception to the present work and must also have been made around the time of the Derbais compositions. This beautiful picture was first recorded in the collection of the war hero and publisher Antoine de La Roque; the publication of an engraving of the painting by Aubert was announced in April 1735 in La Roque's journal, the Mercure de France. La Roque's painting depicts a similarly recumbent nude goddess with pearls in her hair and arrows at her feet, though here she reclines in a canopied bedchamber rather than the heavens; however, she does not dream alone - for Cupid, once again at her side, is also asleep. Colin Bailey has shown (see Baillio, op. cit.) that when La Roque's painting (which measures 66.5 x 83.3 cm.) appeared in the sale of his estate, it was incorporated into the headboard of his bed. (The bed was sold with the picture.) Its function probably determined why both Venus and Cupid are depicted asleep and in a bedroom, rather than a celestial setting, but its inclusion in the ornamental scheme of a bedroom may suggest the original purpose and location of Boucher's other depictions of the subject, including the present one.
We are grateful to Alastair Laing for confirming the attribution and for providing additional provenance and literature.