Venus, Mars and Cupid

1621

Object data

pen and black ink, with brush and olive green wash; framing line in black ink (partly trimmed off)

height 177 mm × width 137 mm

Inscriptions

signed and dated: upper left, in black ink, Jan van Loenen / fecit / 1621
inscribed on verso: lower centre, in a seventeenth-century hand, in grey-brown ink, a six-line inscription, partly erased and difficult to read; lower left, in brown ink, w5; upper right, in pencil, contours of a face
stamped on verso : lower right, with the mark of William Bates (L. 2604)

Technical notes

watermark: none

Provenance

…; collection William Bates (1824-1884), Birmingham; …; ? sale, London (Sotheby's), 19 January 1887 sqq; …; sale, S.H. de la Sablonière (1825-88, Kampen) and C. Ekama (1824-91, Haarlem), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 30 June 1891, no. 141 (‘Jan van Loenen. Mars, Vénus et l'Amour. Plume et lavis. Signé: ‘‘Jan van Loenen fecit 1621’’ (Manière de Saenredam). - H. 18, L. 14 cent.’), fl. 2.50, to William Pitcairn Knowles (1820-94), Rotterdam and Wiesbaden (L. 2643);¹ his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 25-26 June 1895, no. 400, fl. 3, to the Vereniging Rembrandt;² from whom, fl. 3.45, to the museum, 1899

Object number: RP-T-1899-A-4296

The artist

Jan van Loenen (Utrecht, c. 1596 - Utrecht, 1643)

He was born in Utrecht but active in Grenoble for the majority of his artistic career. In 1615, Van Loenen travelled to Italy with fellow artist Jan van Niwael (1595-1674). He was back in Grenoble before 11 December 1616.³ Up until 1634 he is recorded in Grenoble, where he decorated coats of arms, sculptures and painted portraits. In 1621, he asked the city council of Grenoble for tax exemption for the years he had been away from the city; apparently, he did travel frequently in those years.⁴

In 1634, Van Loenen returned to Utrecht, where he set up a workshop with Van Niwael. Three years later, on 4 February 1637, he married the widow Petronella Quirijns van Cuijlenburch (?-?). Van Niwael married Petronella’s sister two year later.⁵ Van Loenen drew up his will in Utrecht on 21 February 1643 and was buried not long after, on 6 March 1643.⁶

A handful of his paintings are in public and private collections. A signed and dated portrait of A Young Boy (1634), probably Willem van der Muelen (1631-1690) – his first-known work after his return from Grenoble – is in the Landesmuseum, Hannover;⁷ a portrait from 1639 of Swana van Ledenbergh (?-1655) is in the collection of Zuylen Castle (inv. no. S 256), just outside of Utrecht. The latter collection includes several unsigned paintings that are attributed to Van Loenen based on stylistic evidence. The drawing in the Rijksmuseum is the only known sheet by his hand.

Carolyn Mensing, 2020

References
E. Maignien, Jean de Loenen, Grenoble 1887; U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXIII (1929), pp. 321-22; W.L. van de Watering, ‘Van Loenen’, De Nederlandsche Leeuw 90 (1973), p. 185; W.A. Wijburg, ‘Van Loenen’, De Nederlandsche Leeuw 90 (1973), p. 226; S. Levert, ‘Jan Cornelisz. van Loenen et Jan Rutgersz van Niwael: “Les flamans paintres demeurant à la maison de Collavoy”’, Oud Holland 130 (2017) no. 3/4, pp. 157-77

Entry

The Jan van Loenen who signed this drawing is very probably the Johan Cornelisz van Loenen who worked in Grenoble for many years, before returning to his native Utrecht in 1634. In 1621, the year that he dated this drawing, he applied to the city authorities of Grenoble for tax exemption because he had been away for several years. Mars, Venus and Cupid – a rather clumsy effort in a Late Mannerist idiom – is the only known drawing by this minor master. Van Loenen was not a very good inventor: not only is the god of war legless, but the table is too, leaving it floating eerily in space.

Such details are normally telltale signs of a copy. Indeed, the drawing is directly based on the group of Mars, Venus and Cupid that forms the centrepiece of a composition by Joachim Wtewael (1566-1638), the Wedding of Peleus and Thetis, known in several drawn and painted versions. Van Loenen’s drawing was previously linked with two painted versions on copper – both regarded as autograph and dated by Wtewael expert Lowenthal between 1606 and 1610 – one previously in the collection of Mr and Mrs Saul P. Steinberg, New York, which was sold privately in 2000 through the New York dealer Richard Feigen,⁸ and the other in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy (inv. no. 1379).⁹ As Schapelhouman noted in 1998, however, there are minor differences between both of these painted models and the drawing. This led him to assume that Van Loenen probably drew the figure group from memory rather than copying it directly.¹⁰

There are no such discrepancies in two other versions of the theme by Wtewael, a drawing in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig (inv. no. Z 264 ).¹¹ The RKD text for this drawing incorrectly states that it is based on a panel painting of the subject by Wtewael, signed and dated 1610, in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (inv. no. 62 058) and another oil on copper, dated 1612, now in the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (inv. no. 1991.9), which was unknown at the time of Lowenthal’s monograph on Wtewael.¹² The Rijksmuseum drawing is almost certainly derived from the Williamstown painting, with its identically posed figures, an identical chair, a legless table, and even similar still-life elements on the table.¹³ The drapery repoussoir at upper right of the Amsterdam copy is Van Loenen’s own invention, creating a vague setting for the figure group he extracted from Wtewael’s composition.

Marijn Schapelhouman, 1998/Jane Shoaf Turner, 2020

Literature

U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXIII (1929), pp. 321-22; Flandre et Hollande an Siècle d'Or: Chefs-d'ceuvre des Musées de Rhéme-Alpes, exh. cat. Lyons (Musée des Beaux-Arts)/Bourg-en-Bresse (Musée de Brou)/Roanne (Musée Déchelette) 1992, p. 34

Citation

M. Schapelhouman, 1998/J. Turner, 2020, 'Jan Cornelisz. van Loenen, Venus, Mars and Cupid, 1621', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.54763

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