Virgin and Child

Entry

This signed and precisely dated (2/19 1728 = 19 February 1728) terracotta is an early work by the Antwerp sculptor Walter Pompe (1703-1777). According to Van Herck the artist’s descendants own a preliminary study of the figure on paper, dated 13 October 1727.² The drawing and terracotta date from the period in which the young sculptor had not yet established himself as an independent master and was still looking for a style of his own. At that time Pompe often took works by his illustrious Antwerp predecessors as examples or references, particularly those of his teacher Michiel van der Voort (1667-1737), whose workshop he would only leave permanently in 1733, when he was 30 years of age.³

It is abundantly clear that the composition of the figure of the Virgin harks back to François du Quesnoy’s (1597-1643) St Susanna in the Santa Maria di Loreto in Rome (fig. a.), one of the most famous and influential sculptures of the high baroque. Since Pompe had never been in Rome, as far as we know, he would have based his work on a reproduction in plaster, examples of which existed,⁴ or on one or more drawings or sculptural imitations of this work. They may have circulated in the workshop of his teacher, who had spent several years in Rome. Theuerkauff related the terracotta with the marble Virgin and Child which Van der Voort had made in 1709 for the funerary monument of Hubertus Guilielmus de Precipiano (Sint-Rumolduskerk, Mechelen) (fig. b) and which also exhibits some parallels with the Susanna.⁵

Contrary to what was maintained in the past,⁶ Pompe is very likely to have conceived his terracotta not as a model for a larger sculpture, but as an independent small-scale sculpture. Later he would produce his best and most original works in that genre. An unsigned Virgin and Child which largely coincides with the composition of the Amsterdam terracotta, is attributed to Walter Pompe and dated round 1730.⁷ Although the sculptor was still searching for a style of his own, in this version Pompe had already moved further away from Du Quesnoy’s prototype. For instance, the folds of the Virgin’s cloak are more baroque, he has put a scarf on her head and this time omitted the cloak that was commonly wrapped round Susanna’s right arm, to give the composition a more open character. However, compared to the terracotta featured here, the draperies are less fluid in design, and the Christ Child lacks the chubby charm that normally characterizes Pompe’s putti.

Closer to the present terracotta is a boxwood sculpture that recently surfaced on the French art market. Apart from the altered pose of the Christ Child, the statuette is almost it’s exact mirror-image. Although unsigned, the carving’s attribution to Pompe is convincing and further supported by a drawing signed and dated 1738 by Pompe of a Virgin with a Christ Child in a comparable pose in the Art and History Museum in Brussels.⁸

Bieke van der Mark, 2025