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Lot Essay
This graceful and beautifully composed mythological scene had, like many of the works of Nicolas Loir, long sheltered under an attribution to Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), the classical master for whom Loir had a lifelong reverence. Indeed, Loir’s debt to Poussin’s own bacchanalian scenes – the Bacchanal Before a Herm in the National Gallery, London, for example – is obvious, but his close study of other mythologies by Poussin, such as the great Kingdom of Flora in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, is also readily apparent in the composition of this Triumph of Bacchus.
Bacchus, a fertility god, is popularly remembered as the God of Wine, and his rites were accompanied by frenzied and drunken orgies. In Loir’s rendering, Bacchus is a beautiful, naked youth who wears a crown of vine leaves and grapes and holds a thyrsus, a wand tipped with a pine cone, an ancient fertility symbol. He rises from his triumphal chariot and pauses to observe his drunken attendants, some collapsed on the ground following a night of revelry; a beautiful dawn rises behind his head, breaking through a great sky of clouds. A putto with a mask wrestles to the ground the leopards that pulled Bacchus’ car; to the left, Silenus is supported by a satyr; to the right, a Maenad dances to the music of her tambourine, her drapery swirling around her; behind Bacchus another Maenad festoons a herm of Pan with a crown of leaves; everywhere, clay wine pitchers are overturned and empty. By choosing to depict ‘the morning after’, Loir creates a scene of remarkable quiet and classical calm, notably different from the frenzy of movement and noise that Poussin evoked in his famous Triumph of Pan in the National Gallery, London.
Born into a family of goldsmiths and engravers, Loir was a pupil of Sébastien Bourdon. He was in Rome from 1647 to 1649, where he met André Félibien and Poussin, destined to be the greatest influences on him and his work. Back in Paris, he was commissioned to paint the May for Notre Dame in 1650, Saint Paul Blinding the False Prophet (still in situ), a massive work inspired by both Poussin and Raphael. In 1663, he was received into the Academy but did not present his diploma piece for another three years, the large allegory, Progress of the Arts of Drawing under the Reign of Louis XIV in Compiègne. He received numerous Crown commissions for the decorations of the royal châteaux, including the Tuileries, Fontainebleau and Versailles, most of which have not survived.
Although its earliest history is yet to be discovered, Moana Weil-Curiel has noted that the present Triumph of Bacchus is 'une oeuvre incontestable de cet artiste’. She cites various details that, she observes, are as characteristic of Loir ‘as to be signatures’: the elegant treatment of Bacchus’s body and smooth musculature, similar to his depiction of Apollo in the large Allegory of the Arts in the Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport; the manner of depicting vegetation, with the bark of the tree trunks pitted and spotted and imperfect, as in Nature; a blanket of flowers in the foreground, seen as well in Loir’s painting of Moses Saved from the Waters in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper; his mastery of the successive, receding planes of space in the landscape, all characteristic of Loir’s finest works. Weil-Curiel dates the present painting to the 1660s.
Bacchus, a fertility god, is popularly remembered as the God of Wine, and his rites were accompanied by frenzied and drunken orgies. In Loir’s rendering, Bacchus is a beautiful, naked youth who wears a crown of vine leaves and grapes and holds a thyrsus, a wand tipped with a pine cone, an ancient fertility symbol. He rises from his triumphal chariot and pauses to observe his drunken attendants, some collapsed on the ground following a night of revelry; a beautiful dawn rises behind his head, breaking through a great sky of clouds. A putto with a mask wrestles to the ground the leopards that pulled Bacchus’ car; to the left, Silenus is supported by a satyr; to the right, a Maenad dances to the music of her tambourine, her drapery swirling around her; behind Bacchus another Maenad festoons a herm of Pan with a crown of leaves; everywhere, clay wine pitchers are overturned and empty. By choosing to depict ‘the morning after’, Loir creates a scene of remarkable quiet and classical calm, notably different from the frenzy of movement and noise that Poussin evoked in his famous Triumph of Pan in the National Gallery, London.
Born into a family of goldsmiths and engravers, Loir was a pupil of Sébastien Bourdon. He was in Rome from 1647 to 1649, where he met André Félibien and Poussin, destined to be the greatest influences on him and his work. Back in Paris, he was commissioned to paint the May for Notre Dame in 1650, Saint Paul Blinding the False Prophet (still in situ), a massive work inspired by both Poussin and Raphael. In 1663, he was received into the Academy but did not present his diploma piece for another three years, the large allegory, Progress of the Arts of Drawing under the Reign of Louis XIV in Compiègne. He received numerous Crown commissions for the decorations of the royal châteaux, including the Tuileries, Fontainebleau and Versailles, most of which have not survived.
Although its earliest history is yet to be discovered, Moana Weil-Curiel has noted that the present Triumph of Bacchus is 'une oeuvre incontestable de cet artiste’. She cites various details that, she observes, are as characteristic of Loir ‘as to be signatures’: the elegant treatment of Bacchus’s body and smooth musculature, similar to his depiction of Apollo in the large Allegory of the Arts in the Atkinson Art Gallery, Southport; the manner of depicting vegetation, with the bark of the tree trunks pitted and spotted and imperfect, as in Nature; a blanket of flowers in the foreground, seen as well in Loir’s painting of Moses Saved from the Waters in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper; his mastery of the successive, receding planes of space in the landscape, all characteristic of Loir’s finest works. Weil-Curiel dates the present painting to the 1660s.