20067148

Liotard's "Sleeping Venus" after TitianAuthor(s): Marcel RoethlisbergerSource: Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 28, No. 55, In This Issue Special Articles in Memory ofWilliam R. Rearick (1930-2004). Part 1 (2007), pp. 149-154Published by: IRSA s.c.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20067148 .

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MARCEL ROETHLISBERGER

Liotard's Sleeping Venus after Titian

I shall always recall with pleasure luncheon discussions

with Roger Rearick while I was his colleague at the University of Maryland. They were eye-openers, and he was generous with information and help. Although Liotard was hardly his

concern, he might have solved right away the problem of iden

tification which I here submit to readers of this journal. Jean Etienne Liotard (Geneva, 1702-1789) is best known for

his brilliant international career as a portrait painter in pastels,

moving from court to court, dressed in Turkish garb ever since

his sojourn in Constantinople. His art does not seem to rhyme offhand with Titian and Venus. He spent three years in Italy, from

1735 to 1738, mainly in Rome, most of his production being lost.

He portrayed the pope, cardinals, the whole exiled Stuart court, and did pastel copies of the antique Three Graces and Bernini's

Apollo and Daphne, both now in Amsterdam, as well as a Her

maphrodite and a Dying Gladiator (lost). This sums up his classi

cal repertory. He remained otherwise immune to Italian art and to

antiquity, an attitude with which he was far from alone among rococo painters of his generation, even though in his late Trait?

des principes et des r?gles de la peinture of 1781 he would pay tribute to Correggio and Italian Renaissance painters.

In 1745 he also spent some six months in Venice, portray

ing Algarotti and the British ambassador and meeting Rosal

ba, who declared his Chocolate Girl (sold there to Dresden)

the finest pastel ever seen. His only other link with Venetian

art, and a very tenuous link, is the Venus which is the subject of the following text.

Like many other painters of his time, Liotard was also an

eager collector of old master paintings - no contemporaries

-

which he amassed for reasons of social prestige toward his

aristocratic clientele and for speculation. During his last thirty years he owned an average of two hundred paintings, while

continuing to buy and sell. He bought the core of his collection en bloc in 1755 on the flourishing Amsterdam art market dur

ing his first sojourn in Holland, by which time he had accumu

lated a considerable fortune. What he called several times his

most precious possession was the Sleeping Venus after Titian, first heard of in his now unknown catalogue of 1756 with the

very steep estimate of 12,000 livres, and sold in 1788, after

which its trace is lost. So fond of it was he that he copied it

twice in pastel and in 1780 did a mezzotint engraving of it

[Figs. 1-3]. It is not known where it came from. An acquisition in Italy is unlikely, as he became wealthy only by the time of his

second Parisian sojourn, 1748/52. In 1788, Liotard being very

aged, rich, but the art market being on a low ebb during those

pre-revolutionary years, his son sold the Titian in Paris, almost

certainly to the dealer Lebrun, for what a co-heir called the vile sum of 1,200 livres.

149




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1) Jean Etienne Liotard, ?Sleeping Venus? after Titian, pastel, 30 x 40 cm. Private collection.

The painting, of unknown size but probably not large, rep

resented a nude with curly hair extended on bedclothes upon the ground, in front of a landscape, framed by draperies and

curtains; as in Giorgione's famous painting, there is no bed.

Two heads of satyrs peek out from the canopy at the top; one

satyr is holding back the curtain, the other imposes silence. Liotard exhibited the painting in London in his studio show of

1773, number one of the catalogue, "Venus asleep, and two

Satyrs holding up a drapery, with which she was covered. The

contrast, colouring, drawing and effect are beautiful, and the

Picture is in good preservation". He again put up the painting in his sale at Christie on April 16, 1774, lot 81, "A sleeping

Venus", estimated ?100 but unsold. He discussed it in his trea

tise of 1781, pp. 27, 65, under the chapter of Grace: "La V?nus

endormie du Titien [...] a beaucoup de gr?ce dans son som

meil, dans son attitude, dans la forme & la belle proportion de

150



_LIOTARD'S SLEEPING VENUS AFTER TITIAN

2) Jean Etienne Liotard, ?Sleeping Venus? after Titian, pastel, 30 x 40 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

ses membres: toute cette figure semble faite de la main des

Gr?ces; c'est le plus bel ornement de mon cabinet ? Gen?ve

[...]. La couleur en est tr?s-belle & s'est bien conserv?e". Try

ing once more to sell it, he included it in 1785 among some

fifty paintings by old masters and from his own hand offered to the French royal collection, but none of the items was taken

up.

In addition to this work, Liotard also owned what seems to have been an anonymous copy of it. It appears as a nameless

work in his Paris studio exhibition of 1771, lot 30, "V?nus endormie Copie du Titien. Hauteur 34, larg. 431/2"" (c. 86 x 110

cm). Unsold, he again offered it in his London sale of 1774

already quoted, which also included Titian's original, "Titian -

Venus with Cupids, after" (the heads of the satyrs were mis read as Cupids), sold for a modest ?2.15, untraced since.

The Titian is reproduced in reverse in one of the finest

engravings of Antoine Louis Romanet (Paris 1742/43 - after

1810), inscribed Le Titien Pinxit I A. Romanet Sculpsit [Fig. 4]. This rare, highly detailed print differs in several details from Liotard's two pastel copies: the drapery over the body and the odd heads of the satyrs are removed, the width is slightly broadened, yet there can be little doubt that the print repro duces the painting having belonged to Liotard. The graphic technique points to a date late in the century, and the absence of a legend of ownership in the wide lower margin may indi

3) Jean Etienne Liotard, ?Sleeping Venus? after Titian, mezzotint, 35 x 46.5 cm. Private collection.

4) Antoine Romanet, ?Sleeping Venus? after Titian, mezzotint, 31.2 x 45.3 cm. Private collection.

cate that it was done for the Paris market right after the sale of the painting in 1788. Romanet was a reproductive engraver of

151




5) John Vanderlyn, ?Ariadne Asleep on Naxos?, oil on canvas, 174 x 221 cm. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,

Philadelphia, Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr. Collection).

uneven merit who is known to have adapted to the demands of

the commerce.

What about the attribution of Liotard's unknown painting,

which nobody would nowadays credit to Titian? Liotard was

both an experienced connoisseur and avaricious man. Like

most of the lesser collections of his age, his contained several

overly optimistic attributions to great masters such as Rem

brandt, Rubens, Watteau. Yet, as his copies and texts attest,

he was evidently so fond of the painting as to go far out in

asserting Titian's name in front of discriminating audiences in

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_LIOTARD'S SLEEPING VENUS AFTER TITIAN

London and Paris. It would seem that he firmly believed in Tit

ian's authorship. The author may in reality be a late follower of

Titian, possibly a northern painter. No other version seems to

be known. The nearest analogy, especially in the pose of the

woman, is, somewhat surprisingly, Vanderlyn's large Ariadne

Asleep of 1809-1814, painted in Paris [Fig. 5]. He himself cited as a source of inspiration Correggio's Venus/Antiope in the

Louvre, but the link is only generic. Do Vanderlyn and Liotard's

Titian share a common source? A somewhat comparable, yet less close resemblance appears in Van Dyck's often-copied

Jupiter and Antiope (Cologne). In his London studio show of 1773 quoted above, Liotard

exhibited not only the Titian but also, for the first time, his own

pastel copy of it, number 39, described in the French catalogue written by himself as "Liotard - Une copie en pastel de la Venus

du Titien; copi?e avec toute l'exactitude possible, finie d'apr?s trois diff?rentes natures [?]; je ne crois pas ?tre arriv? aux

gr?ces et ? la d?licatesse de l'original". The English version of

the catalogue is simplified: "Liotard - A copy in crayons of

Venus, most exactly done from Titian, and finished from the life"

(the latter is merely a standard formula), estimated ?40, unsold. Liotard's death inventories of 1789 and 1791 (same num

bering), formulated very succinctly, enumerate two pastel

copies of the Venus by Liotard, numbers 194 and 200, one

estimated 10 livres, the other 5 livres. They must be the two

existing at present, both measuring 30 x 40 cm and descend

ed among Liotard's heirs in Holland to the Tilanus family. One

[Fig. 1], on paper, kept in the family until the 1930s and now in

private hands, is slightly more summary in the execution. The

other [Fig. 2], on vellum, bequeathed by Tilanus in 1885 to the

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, is slightly sharper in colour and

design. While the former may have been a first trial, their

precedence cannot be made out, nor can we say which of the

two carried the higher estimate. The colour range is the same:

the bed cloth is white, the drapery around the body a chang ing red and brown, its reverse blue-green, the cushion blue, the framing curtain dark yellow, the canopy greyish brown, the

sky blue with a pink horizon.

Copying his own works on request was nothing unusual

for Liotard. Most in demand were understandably his oriental

themes: Lady in Turkish dress and her slave, Lady in Turkish

dress on a sofa, which he would repeat whenever there was a demand. He also copied a few of his old master paintings (Potter, van Mieris). He copied the Titian Venus at his own ini

tiative, but both specimens failed to sell. Indications for a pre cise dating of them are tenuous: the handling differs from the more precise execution of the notably larger Three Graces and

Apollo and Daphne done in Rome, thus suggesting a much later date, nearer indeed to the Callipygian Venus of 1774.

A date of the two pastel copies in the 1760s, done in Geneva, seems most probable.

Late in his life, surpassed by time, receiving no more por trait commissions, yet indefatigable, he took up his early taste

for theoretizing by writing his treatise, published in 1781. It

was accompanied by seven mezzotint engravings, to be sold

separately, but to which the text often refers. Much earlier

in life, he had produced seven engravings. The English engravers Houston and McArdell and the Frenchmn Vispr? had meanwhile done ten fine commercial mezzotints of por traits of Liotard. A constant explorer of techniques, he tried it

himself from 1778 to 1780, stating in the foreword "j'ai fait

graver [unknown by whom], & j'ai grav? moi-m?me en partie,

sept estampes de diff?rentes grandeurs [...]. [Elles] n'ont pas ?t? aussi bien grav?es que je l'aurois d?sir?, & que je l'es

p?rois". Five of these plates are after his own works, two after

old masters of his collection. The Sleeping Venus is his largest

print, in reverse of the painting [Fig. 3], inscribed grav? par J. E. Liotard Venus Endormie. Par le Titien. Beau Contraste. Bel

effet. Et dessein admirable. It is very dark and thus unsuitable to be illustrated. Although he did not approach the mastery of

his English colleagues, the print does succeed in evoking the

mystery of an atmospheric oil painting. One other Venus theme caught Liotard's attention in his

last years, this time a piece of sculpture derived from the

antique. It is the Callipygian Venus, originally a statue of a woman removing her drapery, which was extremely popular at his time. Liotard was confronted with an example during his

second London sojourn 1773-1775 and there copied it in pas tel in 1774 [Fig. 6], the same size of his early Roman pastels after classical themes. As shown by the whole image and its

base, his model must have been a recent high relief plaster ver

sion. Only full statues are known from antiquity, propagated at

Liotard's time most of all by a much-copied statue of Valadier of 1773. Liotard made two seemingly identical pastels of this sub

ject, one sold right away at his Christie's sale in April of the same year and presently in private hands after a Swiss sale of 1959. He kept the other for himself; untraceable in the death

inventories, it remained among his heirs and is unknown since 1897. It is basically a grisaille, but Liotard again enlivened it by

giving it light colours of flesh and hair, thus producing an

almost contradictory effect of a marble statue come to life. Of this image too, Liotard made six years later a mezzotint

included among the seven prints accompanying the treatise. It

is the reversed mezzotint inscribed La Venus aux belles fesces. I Dessin? dapr?s l? Statue de pl?tre moul?e Sur l'antique parJ. E. Liotard et grav? par lui-m?me. 1780 [Fig. 7]. The term "statue" need not imply a full-round statue. The framing is tightened by comparison with the pastel. In his treatise, he comments on this

153




I '. nm/-Ki:.

6) Jean Etienne Liotard, ?Callipygian Venus?, pastel, 64 x 52 cm. Location unknown.

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7) Jean Etienne Liotard, ?Callipygian Venus?, mezzotint, 36 x 23.8 cm. Private collection.

plate: "[...] cit?e pour l'effet & le relief [...] nous entendons par

effet, la r?union du saillant & du clair-obscur [...]. Le meilleur

moyen pour produire de l'effet, est de mettre moiti? ombre, &

moiti? clair", which aptly describes the effect of plasticity. Still on the same theme, an unpublished letter of Liotard to

Fran?ois Tronchin of April 6, 1781 from Lyon, where he over

saw the publication of his treatise, informs us that he borrowed

from an important personality in town a plaster relief of this

exact figure, planning to make a copy; nothing further is heard

of it. The theme of the "fair buttocks" seems to have been on

his mind at the time. Portraiture, a Calvinist upbringing and

Turkish genre scenes never called for nudes in Liotard's pro

duction. The works discussed here are indeed the only nudes

as well as the only ancient motifs of his whole output.

154



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20067148