Jean-François de Troy (Paris 1679-1752 Rome)

The present canvas envisions a passionate encounter between Venus, the goddess of Love, and her mortal lover, the beautiful young hunter Adonis, for whom she conceives a helpless passion. Although the story had been a favorite of visual artists since the time of Titian, de Troy's canvas is notable for its frank sensuality - Colin Bailey (op. cit.) describes it as 'exceedingly immodest' - and for its casual relationship to Ovid's text; indeed, no particular episode from the story appears to have been in de Troy's mind when he painted it and the protagonists would be unidentifiable were it not for the presence of Adonis' hunting dogs and Venus' swans. Largely unconcerned with textual fidelity or demonstrations of classical erudition, de Troy's painting is an unrestrained paean to pagan carnality of a sort that would rarely be found again in the artist's oeuvre. Its pendant is the less salacious Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (lot 28).

A good autograph replica of the Venus and Adonis is in a private collection in France (see C. Leribault, op. cit., p. 184b) and there are also numerous copies of the painting, indicating that it had achieved a considerable degree of fame in the eighteenth century.