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Venus Teaching Cupid to Use His Bow
Louis-Claude Vassé (1716-1772) · 1755-1760
Venus leans over her son Cupid and guides his small hands on the bow, an amused teacher with a mischievous pupil. The subject is playful, but the carving is serious: the goddess's turning body, the drapery that slides down her hip, the child's chubby limbs and the quiver at their feet are all worked with the polish that court taste demanded. Vassé arranged the two figures so that the gaze runs down from the mother's face along her arm to the arrow that Cupid is about to release.
The royal building office commissioned the group in May 1749, Vassé carved it between 1755 and 1760 and was paid twelve thousand five hundred livres in 1761, yet it stayed in his studio. In 1771 Louis the Fifteenth offered it to Madame Du Barry for her château at Louveciennes. Seized at the Revolution, it went to Versailles and was later placed in the Temple of Love in the gardens of the Petit Trianon, then at Saint-Cloud from 1816 to 1871, before returning to Versailles in 1872. The château de Versailles deposited it at the Louvre in 2007.
Did You Know? The group spent years inside the Temple of Love at the Petit Trianon, the little garden pavilion built for Marie-Antoinette.
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