ANTOINE COYPEL Paris, 1661 - 1722

Sleeping Venus Canvas 51.5 x 65 cm - 20 ¼ x 25 9/16 in. Sleeping Venus, oil on canvas PROVENANCE Possibly Pierre Le Tessier de Montarsy (1647 - 1710), to whom the engraver dedicated his piece; Possibly J. A. Peters collection; Possibly his sale in 1779, where Saint-Aubin sketched it in the margin of the catalog. BIBLIOGRAPHY Nicole Garnier, Antoine Coypel 1661 - 1722, Paris, Arthena, 1989, P.159, n°104 (lost painting). RELATED WORK Engraving by Gaspard Duchange (in the same sense as our painting), "dédié à Monsieur de Montarsy, garde des pierreries de la Couronne ; seigneur de Biesvre et de la Motte". preparatory drawing in the Louvre (RF 12.338 albuch Koch, Garnier, op. cit. p. 216, n°407). Several copies are known. Goldsmith Pierre Le Tessier de Montarsy (1647 - 1710) and Antoine Coypel were close friends and family. The former had seen the latter grow up as neighbors, since their fathers had obtained apartments reserved for artists in the galleries of the Louvre, and they later obtained residency there as well. Pierre Letessier was jeweler to King Louis XIV from 1676 to 1710. In 1680, he commissioned the 19-year-old Antoine Coypel to paint the May de Notre-Dame (a lost and unengraved Assumption of the Virgin), followed by his portrait around 1700 (Garnier, p. 135, op. cit. no. 69, also lost). In 1712, Coypel purchased 168 drawings for the king from the estate of Pierre de Montarsy, now in the Louvre. A recurrent theme in Western painting, Sleeping Venus discovered by a satyr is sometimes confused with that of Jupiter and Antiope (the God of Olympus having, on this occasion, taken the form of a satyr). Beyond the "color quarrel", Antoine Coypel proposed a synthesis between the classics and the modernists, well aware of the examples on these subjects by Correggio or Poussin, preserved in the royal collection, or Titian's Venus of the Pardo, which he himself had restored. This amateur painting can be dated to around 1700-1710. Probably commissioned by one artist to another, each in charge of a part of the royal collection, the treatment of the mythological subject anticipates by about ten years the galant and erotic painting of the Regency (Watteau's painting on this theme -Louvre- is to be situated around 1715 - 1716). Madame Nicole Garnier, whom we thank for having examined our painting, kindly indicated that she considered the canvas to be autograph, but noted the probable participation of the studio for the satyr and the two putti on the left.