Benedetto Gennari’s Venus embracing Cupid is an important surviving work from a period of rich artistic practice and patronage that flourished in England in the late 17th Century.

Gennari was a Bolognese painter whose early training took place under his uncle, Guercino. After a sixteen month stay in France prompted by the young painter’s ardent admiration for Louis XIV, Gennari relocated to London in 1674 and soon found work as court painter to Charles II, completing 102 paintings in England during his reign. On Charles II’s death, his brother James succeeded the throne. Like his brother, James II engaged Gennari as a court painter, the artist producing 35 pictures during his four-year reign. Whilst many foreign painters, such as Sir Peter Lely and Henri Gascar, worked for the English monarchy at this time, Gennari’s favour at court seems to have been particularly closely tied to his Catholicism. As was the case with most painters at this time, portraiture formed a large part of the artist’s output, but Gennari was especially known as a history painter of mythological and devotional art that appealed to the Crypto-Catholic Charles II, the outwardly Catholic James II and, importantly, their pious queens too. Gennari stayed in England for fourteen years, eventually fleeing the country in 1689 when the Glorious Revolution and subsequent ascension to the throne of Protestant William III and Mary II made his religion and former association with James II very dangerous indeed.

The mythological painting Venus embracing Cupid was executed around 1685 in the Catholic court of James II and, remarkably, was recorded by the artist in his chronological list of commissions:

‘Un quadro d’una Venera non molto grande a sedere sopra il letto con un panno turchino che le cuopere in atto d’abracciare e baciare un piccolo amoretto quale tiene in mano l’arco e la Saetta e questo dato a Milord Murgraf Gran Chimberlano del Re Giacomo quando fu aclumato Re.’ [1]

(‘A painting of a Venus of no great size seated on a couch with a blue shawl which covers her, in the act of embracing and kissing a little cupid who holds a bow and arrow in his hand, and this given to my Lord Mulgrave, Lord Chamberlain to King James when he was proclaimed King’).

This record, confirmed by Prisco Bagni to refer to our painting, gives us a great insight into how and when the artwork was commissioned.[2] Gennari’s record shows that the first owner of the painting was John Sheffield, 3rd Earl of Mulgrave and later 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby (1647 – 1721). We can date the commission to around 1685 as the entry mentions that the picture was given to Mulgrave when James was proclaimed King. Further dating evidence can be found in Gennari’s list in an entry near our picture, where the artist states that on 6th February 1685, Charles II died a Catholic and was succeeded by his brother, James, Duke of York.

Two other points about this entry bear evaluating. First, whilst our picture is certainly not small, it is perhaps described as such by Gennari as he had produced even larger paintings for the Stuart court, many of which are still in the Royal Collection. Second, Gennari writes that this picture was ‘given’ to Mulgrave when James was proclaimed King. Other entries for pictures belonging to other nobles generally state that the said painting was done ‘for’ the man in question. This slight change of wording could imply that our picture was in fact commissioned by James II as a gift to his friend and courtier Lord Mulgrave.

In his 2004 monograph on Gennari, Angelo Mazza points out that, during the reign of Charles II, mythological romances formed a higher proportion of the artist’s work.[3] This stands in contrast to work produced for James II, whose open Catholicism seems to have resulted in a profusion of religious pictures. This taste for devotional painting does not, however, seem to have trickled down into Gennari’s noble patrons. Dwight Miller demonstrates this in his 1983 article, telling us that the friends of both kings mostly appeared to prefer secular images which ‘often possessed a piquant sensual character’.[4] Miller identifies several of these types of commissions; the Duke of St. Albans, for instance, had The Toilet of Venus painted for him, and Ralph Montagu commissioned a Sleeping Venus. The St Albans Venus compares particularly closely to our picture. Its dimensions are very close and, when Gennari painted our Venus a decade later, he repeated the overall composition of the seated Venus attended by Cupid. Even the two doves at Venus’ feet appear in our picture. Our picture certainly falls into Miller’s category of ‘piquant sensuality’ – Venus is customarily nude and, in her embrace of Cupid, stands as a clear allegory of romantic or erotic love.

The true extent of the painting’s high quality and good original condition has long been obscured not only by discoloured varnishes, but by very old overpaint. Recent conservation carried out by Chesterman & Sons Ltd. has revealed that significant areas of the picture surface had been over painted in oils, probably at some point in the first half of the 18th century. Most significantly, two red curtains had been added to the top left and right edges of the canvas. Post cleaning, these were discovered to be rather crude, later additions and once removed, they revealed a much more sophisticated and subtly coloured purple curtain and drapery which forms the whole background to the picture. The background drapey had been painted out in black, an intervention which also obscured the second dove. Careful removal of this later paint has revealed, for the first time in centuries, Gennari’s original chromatic scheme for the painting which survives in remarkable condition.

Mulgrave (as we shall continue to call him here) inherited the titles of his father, the 2nd Earl, in 1658. After an early naval career, he aligned himself firmly with James, then Duke of York. In 1682, an unsuccessful courtship of James’ daughter, Princess (later Queen) Anne, who was many years his junior, led to him being temporarily expelled from court. By 1685, however, he had been appointed the new king’s Lord Chamberlain. After the Glorious Revolution, Mulgrave reluctantly, but expediently, accepted the new joint Monarchs, but would remain a committed Tory Jacobite. In 1706, and then the Duke of Buckingham and Normanby, he married his third wife, Lady Catherine Darnley. Catherine was an illegitimate daughter of the by now deposed James II and was, unsurprisingly, also a hardened Jacobite who expended much energy in promoting the succession of her half-brother James Stuart (the ‘Old Pretender’) to the British throne.

In 1698, Mulgrave acquired the lease of a large house, called Arlington House, in St. James’s Park. On being created a Duke in 1703, he rebuilt his home and named it Buckingham House (fig. 7). The house was passed to his son, Edmund, 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Normanby (1716 – 1735) who died childless. The house was then inherited by his half-brother, an illegitimate son of Mulgrave, Sir Charles Sheffield 1st Bt. (c. 1706 – 1774), who, in 1762, sold Buckingham House to George III for a sum of £21,000. The building was first referred to as Buckingham Palace in 1791.

Beyond being recorded in Gennari’s picture list, Venus embracing Cupid is most likely referred to in the numerous inventories associated with Buckingham House and the Sheffield family. The Royal Collection archive holds a group of papers grouped under the heading ‘Documents relating to the purchase of Buckingham House by George III’, although most of these date to before the 1760s. In one inventory of Mulgrave’s property at his death, copied, apparently, in 1747, there is mention of ‘a venus and Cupid Italian’.[5] There is a further reference, in an undated document entitled ‘An account of the paintings and pictures at Buckingham House’, to what is presumably the same picture, a ‘Venus and Cupid’ hanging ‘In the little parlour’.[6]

Gennari was, therefore at work in Britain during a brief and rich period when history painting, executed by contemporary artists, was a highly desirable and widely commissioned commodity. Perhaps uniquely in British art history, the artistic output and patronage of this period was fuelled simultaneously by the sensuousness of the royal court and the devotional and religious leanings of those at its head. These conditions attracted a profusion of gifted foreign painters and Gennari’s Venus embracing Cupid stands as a highly compelling testament to that time.

[1] B. Gennari, Raccolta di memorie di Benedetto Gennari, manuscript, M.S.B. 344 in the Bibliotheca Communale dell’ Archiginnasio, Bologna, typescript 1953.

[2] This expertise from Bagni is mentioned in the 1992 Sotheby’s sale catalogue.

[3] See A. Mazza, Benedetto Gennari ritrovato, Cesena, 2004, 30-69.

[4] D.C. Miller, “Benedetto Gennari’s Career at the courts of Charles II and James II, and a Newly Discovered Portrait of James II”, Apollo, January 1983 CXVII, no. 251, p. 27.

[5] Royal Collection Trust Archive, GEO/ADD/1929, p. 11.https://ra.rct.uk/GetMultimedia.ashx?db=Catalog&type=default&fname=GEO_ADD_19_29.pdf

[6] Ibid., p. 147.