Catalogues

Venus and Cupid

In Du Canel's miniature Venus, the Goddess of love and her son Cupid are tenderly turned towards eachother. While the boy devotedly approaches his mother, she pilfers an arrow from his quiver (cf.cat.- no.2008-16). As is generally known, whoever is hit by Cupid's arrow, will fall ardently in love. Presumably exactly this is in the Goddess' mind: she herself may have been attracted to a still resisting earthly youth and now wants to arouse his feelings for her with the arrow's help.

The composition reveals an experienced artist: in spite of his aspiration for a harmonious, pyramidal arrangement of the figures, they themselves appear quite naturally relaxed. In this representation Du Canel had been inspired by Klingstedt's miniatures, the latter being greatly successful in the painting of erotic-suggestive subjects in his day (cf. cat.- no. 2008-36). Without the signature, one might have been tempted to assign the work to the Swede. Like him Du Canel also created the scene in grisaille technique, colouring only individual parts in a subtle red - here the incarnate parts and the ribbons in the hair and on the shoulders of the two gods. Unlike Klingstedt's works, however, Du Canel's miniature lacks all offensiveness.

The miniature is a great rarity, as it had for a long time been the only known work by this nowadays nearly forgotten artist. ¹ Only recently another one of his works has turned up: a picture of Louis XV after Van Loo in the Musée Condé in Chantilly. ² It was painted ten years later than the miniature at hand and is not executed in grisaille technique.

B.P.

¹ The work in the Tansey Collection is quoted as a reference work in Schidlof and Saur. (Schidlof 1964, vol 1, p.131; Saur 1997, vol.16, p.124).

² Cf. Garnier-Pelle, Lemoine-Bouchard and Pappe, pp. 28 and 65.