Lot Essay
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE:
S. Lami, Dictionnaire des Sculpteurs de l'école française au dix-huitième siècle, Paris, 1911, pp. 394-97
At one point in his heroic career, Hercules was punished by being sold as a slave for Omphale, Queen of Lydia. She fell in love with him, however, and in her service Hercules was tamed and became effeminate, wearing women's clothes and spinning yarn, while Omphale wore his lion's skin and borrowed his club. This explains the substitution of a distaff with yarn for Hercules's normal attribute. Vinache may have intended a matching group of Omphale. The pair of lovers sitting side by side had been depicted earlier in the 18th century in a small bronze group by the Florentine sculptor G.B. Foggini (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
Jean-Joseph Vinache (1696-1754) was elected an academician in May 1741 with a marble group of this subject as his morceau de récéption (now in the Louvre Museum, inv. no. 840). He exhibited at the annual Salons of the Académie royale between 1738 and 1747, and was one of the salaries royal sculptors who worked in the Louvre. He carved a number of allegorical religious figures and reliefs as well as a number of mythological statues or groups for gardens of Madame de Pompadour and other courtiers of King Louis XV.
It appears that the present extremely well carved group was a repetition of Vinache's morceau de récéption of 1741 made a decade or so later and a couple of years before his death.
S. Lami, Dictionnaire des Sculpteurs de l'école française au dix-huitième siècle, Paris, 1911, pp. 394-97
At one point in his heroic career, Hercules was punished by being sold as a slave for Omphale, Queen of Lydia. She fell in love with him, however, and in her service Hercules was tamed and became effeminate, wearing women's clothes and spinning yarn, while Omphale wore his lion's skin and borrowed his club. This explains the substitution of a distaff with yarn for Hercules's normal attribute. Vinache may have intended a matching group of Omphale. The pair of lovers sitting side by side had been depicted earlier in the 18th century in a small bronze group by the Florentine sculptor G.B. Foggini (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
Jean-Joseph Vinache (1696-1754) was elected an academician in May 1741 with a marble group of this subject as his morceau de récéption (now in the Louvre Museum, inv. no. 840). He exhibited at the annual Salons of the Académie royale between 1738 and 1747, and was one of the salaries royal sculptors who worked in the Louvre. He carved a number of allegorical religious figures and reliefs as well as a number of mythological statues or groups for gardens of Madame de Pompadour and other courtiers of King Louis XV.
It appears that the present extremely well carved group was a repetition of Vinache's morceau de récéption of 1741 made a decade or so later and a couple of years before his death.