The Infant Jupiter

The prime version of this composition was exhibited by Reynolds at the Royal Academy in 1774 (no.225) and was bought from the artist by Charles Manners, 4th Duke of Rutland for £100 in 1782. It was later destroyed, along with nineteen other works by the artist, in a fire at Belvoir Castle on 26 October 1816, and is now known only through early engravings. The attitude of Reynolds's Infant Jupiter was apparently based on an etching after Carlo Maratta's Infant Christ Adored by Angels, a print which also influenced Reynolds's Infant Hercules (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1786). Postle (op.cit., 2000) notes that 'Reynolds's pupil and copyist John Rising made a copy of the painting which was bought in at his sale in 1818 for 50 guineas' and that while the present picture's early provenance is unknown [it] 'may possibly relate to Rising's unlocated copy'. It may alternatively be identifiable with the copy that James Northcote, Reynolds's pupil and biographer, is recorded as having executed of the original.

The present picture in known to have been in the collection of the American railroad magnate Charles Crocker in the later nineteenth Century.