Oil on canvas
18 ½ x 14 ½ in (47 x 37 cm)
Provenance
Sale, Amsterdam, 8 May 1769, lot 50 (to Coclers);
Private collection, Europe;
Johnny Van Haeften, London
Literature
Rembrandt and the Female Nude, Eric Jan Sluijter, Amsterdam 2006 (p.244, fig. 213, and illustrated in colour p.56).
We are grateful to David Mandrella for confirming the attribution to Jacob van Loo. This painting will appear in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.
In a wooded glade besides a stone well, Diana the huntress and her Nymphs lie sleeping. At Diana’s side lies her bow and quiver of arrows.
Diana was the Roman goddess of the hunt, and also of the moon. Associated with woodland and wild animals, she was also an emblem of chastity. According to Roman mythology, Diana made up a trinity with two other Roman deities: Egeria the water nymph, and Virbius, the woodland god. Egeria is perhaps represented in the present picture as the most prominent Nymph, lying above Diana, while Virbius’s presence is symbolically represented in the surrounding woodland.
Van Loo returned to the theme of Diana on several occasions, and his Diana and Her Nymphs at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin has often been seen as the work that inspired Vermeer’s Diana (Mauritshuis, The Hague) painted c.1655(i). Other depictions of Diana by Van Loo are preserved in the Statens Museum, Copenhagen (dated 1654) and at the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig (c.1655). The present painting can also be compared with Van Loo’s Bathsheba, preserved in the Louvre.
Jacob Van Loo painted history paintings, genre pieces and portraits, however he was best known during his lifetime(ii), and still today, for his sensual and richly coloured mythologies and classicist female nudes, of which the present painting is a beautiful example.
BIOGRAPHY OF JACOB VAN LOO
Sluis 1614 – 1670 Paris
Jacob van Loo was born in Sluis, near Bruges, in 1614. His father was a notary and a protégé of Prince Maurits. As early as 1635, Van Loo’s name is mentioned in an Amsterdam notarial document in connection with the delivery (under contract with the dealer Marten Cretzer) of ten paintings for the sum of 180 gilders and two tulips.
In August 1642 Van Loo was betrothed in Amsterdam to Ann Langele, sister of The Hague painter Marinus Lengele and niece of Jan Mijtens (1614-1670), a prominent portraitist from The Hague. From this marriage seven children were born. The youngest of the four sons, Abraham (who called himself Abraham Louis or Louis; 1652-1712), and Johannes (1654 – after 1694) were also painters.
By the middle of the century Jacob van Loo had evidently made a name for himself both in Amsterdam and elsewhere. In 1649 Constantijn Huygens, the erudite secretary to the stadtholder Frederick Hendrik, had placed his name on a list of artists under consideration to decorate the new Huis ten Bosch palace near The Hague. His standing is further demonstrated by his mention alongside Rembrandt and Flinck in a poem written by Jan Vos in 1654.
In January 1652, at the same time as Bol and Flinck, Jacob van Loo purchased Amsterdam citizenship. This fact is doubtless connected with commissions which were then expected for the decoration of the new Amsterdam town hall. Although Van Loo never did receive commissions from either the stadtholder’s court or the Amsterdam municipal administration, he nevertheless did receive other important commissions. For example, he gained the important commission to paint portraits of the Regents and Regentesses of the Aalmoezeniers Armen Werkhuis in Haarlem (1658-9) – a commission that was all the more significant for having been won over the local Haarlem painters Frans Hals, Johannes Verspronck, and Jan de Braij.
Contemporary documents reveal fragments of an extraordinary incident involving a notoriously violent wine merchant, Henrick Breda, who according to contemporary records was “known to one and all for his strength” and who “stopped at nothing to provoke a fight” (iii). In the Autumn of 1660, Van Loo became embroiled in a fight with Breda, and dealt him a wound from which Breda died shortly afterwards. Van Loo was summoned twice by the Lord Sherriff but failed to appear, and as a result was banished for life from the lands of Holland and West Friesland on pain of execution by the sword.
Van Loo fled to Paris, where in 1663 he was admitted to the prestigious Académie de peinture. His son Abraham Louis fathered a generation of leading French painters, one of whom was Carle Vanloo (1705 – 1765).
Jacob van Loo’s work is represented in numerous museums including the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, and the Rijksmuseum.
(i) Dutch Classicism in Seventeenth Century Painting, 1999, cat.26, p164. (published for the exhibition held at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt.)
(ii) Houbraken records that Van Loo “excelled at painting nudes, and female nudes in particular” (Houbraken 1718/21, 3, p. 172)
(iii) A. Bredius, ‘Waarom Jacob Van Loo in 1660 Amsterdam verliet, Oud Holland 34 (1916), pp.47-52.