Cupid Disarmed (L'Amour désarmé) is a c. 1715 oil-on-canvas painting, usually but not definitively attributed to
Antoine Watteau. It is one of eight paintings kept by Watteau's friend and protector
Jean de Jullienne until the latter's death in 1766. Benoît Audran engraved it in 1727 and described and reproduced it in an inventory of the Jullienne collection in 1756. After Jullienne's death the art dealer Boileau bought it for
Jean-Baptiste de Montullé, Jullienne's executor.
It was sold again in 1783 and seems to have been sold from the hôtel Bullion to a British collector after the
Reign of Terror, before returning to France just before 1848. It then entered the collection of the
marquis de Maison, with which it was bought by
Henri d'Orleans, Duke of Aumale in 1868, who hung it in the salle de la Tribune in his
château de Chantilly. It still forms part of the
Musée Condé.
Topic
It is one of the rare mythological paintings painted by Watteau, representing Venus grasping Cupid's bow. One hypothesis is that it was painted at the time of the reception of the painter at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. According to Pierre-Jean Mariette, Watteau was inspired by a drawing by
Paul Veronese which had belonged to Pierre Crozat then to Mariette himself and which is now kept in the Louvre museum.[1]
By its format and its characters, the painting has also been compared to another painting by Watteau: Autumn, which is also kept at the Louvre.[2]
There are many replicas of it. It is a relatively common theme in academic painting, taken up by
François Boucher in 1751.
Further reading
Adhémar, Hélène (1950). Watteau; sa vie, son oeuvre (in French). Includes "L’univers de Watteau", an introduction by
René Huyghe. Paris: P. Tisné. cat. no. 177.
OCLC853537.
Ferré, Jean (1979). Watteau (artbook). Paris: Editions de Vergennes. p. 26.
OCLC1151684010 – via the Internet Archive.
Garnier-Pelle, Nicole (1995). Chantilly, musée Condé. Peintures du xviiie siècle. Inventaire des collections publiques de France (in French). Vol. 38. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux. pp. 148–150; cat. no. 110.
OCLC33264438.
Hattori, Cordélia (2010). "Jean-Baptiste François de Montullé (1721-1787). Collectionneur de Watteau, van Loo, Greuze, Vernet, etc". Les Cahiers d'Histoire de l'Art. 8: 49–67.
Institut de France, Paris (1979). Peintures célèbres du Musée Condé. Chantilly: Institut de France. p. 34.
OCLC26209642.
Mathey, Jacques (1959). Antoine Watteau. Peintures réapparues inconnues ou négligées par les historiens (in French). Paris: F. de Nobele. p. 68.
OCLC954214682.
Montagni, E. C. (1968). L'opera completa di Watteau. Classici dell'arte (in Italian). Vol. 21. Introduction by Giovanni Macchia. Milano: Rizzoli. p. 107; cat. no. 124.
OCLC1006284992. For the English edition, see
Camesasca 1971.{{
cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (
link)
Zimmermann, E. Heinrich[in German] (1912). Watteau: des Meisters Werke in 182 Abbildungen. Klassiker der Kunst (in German). Vol. 21. Stuttgart, Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. pp. 49, 187.
OCLC561124140.
Eidelberg, Martin (December 2014).
"L'Amour désarmé". A Watteau Abecedario.
Archived from the original on October 17, 2020. Retrieved October 17, 2020.