Venus disarming Mars

A pupil of Gerard Seghers, Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert was one of the leading Antwerp artists of his generation, and an important interpreter of the style of Sir Anthony van Dyck for the Continental market, during and after van Dyck's English period. Amongst his copies after van Dyck is another version of the present picture in the Galleria Colonna, Rome, based on a lost prototype by the older artist (A. Heinrich, Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, Ein Flmischer Nachfolger van Dycks, Turnhout 2003, I, p. 311, no. B1; see also H. Vey in Van Dyck, A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London 2004, p. 404-405, no. III.A12). Apart from the present lot and the Colonna picture, the only surviving evidence of van Dyck's original are a brush drawing of the composition by van Dyck (without the horse and the cupid on the right) in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig and an engraving by Coenrad Waumans and Jacobus Coelmans. It has never before been noted that the buyer in the 1812 sale was the dealer and collector Gregoire-Hippolyte Delaroche (c. 1750-c. 1824), father of the celebrated nineteenth-century painter of histoires, Paul Delaroche.