John, 1st Earl Spencer

British, 1734 - 1783

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A seated nude woman reaches for and embraces a partially clothed man as he begins to stride away in this horizontal painting. A winged child holds a dove near his face to our left, and two dogs stand to our right of the pair. The woman sits facing away from us, twisting to our right. Her knees are bent with one knee raised as she leans back on her seat and turns to wrap her arms around the man’s chest. Her flushed face looks up toward the man. She has pale skin, and her blond hair is braided and coiled on the back of her head. A sheer white cloth drapes from her left shoulder, along the left side of her body, and over that knee. Her seat is covered with an orchid-pink cloth. The man strides to our right with his shoulders angled in that direction. He turns his head to look at the woman under lowered lids. He has short, curly brown hair, and his pink lips are parted. He wears a steel-blue toga tied in place with a gold band over one shoulder. A horn is tied around his waist with a gold sash. He wears a shin-high, laced sandal on the leg we can see. The arm closer to the woman is held high, that hand gripping a tall staff. He holds the leashes of the two dogs with his other hand, by his side. A pink band is tied around that upper arm. One bronze-brown dog stands facing our right in profile, while the other, closer to us, has a white body and a brown head, which hangs down as it looks to our left. Both dogs have floppy ears, and their mouths are open with their pink tongues hanging out. In the shadows just beyond the woman’s back knee, the winged baby hunches his shoulders while holding the white dove to his cheek. The cherub has short, blond hair, rounded, flushed cheeks, and small white wings. The elbow closer to us rests on a ledge or tree branch. A tree grows up next to the cherub, reaching off the top edge of the painting. A hill rises to our right in the distance, and a rainbow arcs against a pale blue sky screened with parchment-white clouds. A bright white flash in the upper right corner illuminates the trees beneath it.
Titian, Italian 16th Century, Venus and Adonis, c. 1540s/c. 1560-1565, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.84

Venus and Adonis

Titian, Italian 16th Century · c. 1540s/c. 1560-1565 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1942.9.84

In a space almost entirely shrouded in shadow, light falls across a bearded man kneeling in front of a woman cradling an infant, as about a dozen people to our left look on in this horizontal painting. The people all appear to have light skin, though some are deep in shadow. The scene is painted with dabs and soft strokes of peanut and coffee brown, golden yellow, ivory, smoke gray, and muted terracotta red, so many of the details are indistinct. At the bottom center of the painting, the man, woman, and baby are small in scale, reaching less than halfway up the composition. The kneeling man wears a long, pale yellow robe that pools around his bent legs. Facing our right in profile, he has a fringe of gray hair around his balding head and a gray beard. He reaches out toward the baby resting along the woman's lap. The man holds an instrument like a stylus at the baby’s groin, and the child’s legs are bare. The infant is wrapped in a white cloth over his head and torso, and gold-colored fabric drapes over his head and shoulders. With tiny, rounded features, the baby looks toward the man at his feet. The woman wears a long-sleeved, muted red dress with white fabric across her chest. She looks down, and her head is wrapped with a pale gray turban that falls to either side of her face and covers her hair. At the front of the group of men and women looking on, to our left, a bearded man wearing a brown turban, a waist-length dark gray cape, and a lighter gray robe writes in an open book slung over his forearm. Several people, most also wearing turbans in silver gray, ruby red, or terracotta brown look over the man’s shoulder. A few more people look down at the scene from the shadows above, near the upper left corner of the painting. Behind the woman and child, a ladder leans against a platform, perhaps a loft, and draped fabric creates a canopy over the woman. A jumble of objects there merge with the deep shadows.
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Circumcision, 1661, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.60

The Circumcision

Rembrandt van Rijn · 1661 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1942.9.60

Bibliography

1965

  • Cooper, Douglas, ed. Great Family Collections. New York, 1965:197-240