AFTER THE ANTIQUE, CIRCLE OF HUBERT GERHARD (DIED BEFORE 1621), EARLY 17TH CENTURY

This small bronze is based upon an antique marble original which was discovered in the 16th century and which is now in the Museo Nazionale, Naples. It was widely reproduced in the 17th and 18th centuries for its faintly erotic subject, but one of the earliest known examples is a bronze in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which Nicholas Penny tentatively attributes to Hubert Gerhard (see N. Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum 1540 to the Present Day, Oxford, 1992, II, no. 351, pp. 130-133). Although not identical to the Ashmolean bronze, the present lot shares with it the ample proportions and realism one associates with northern artists such as Gerhard.