Live Auction 7863Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings & Watercolours Day
Nicolaes Knüpfer (Leipzig 1609-1655 Utrecht)
Lot 115

Nicolaes Knüpfer (Leipzig 1609-1655 Utrecht)

'Wine is Venus's Milk'

Closed7 July 2010

Price Realised

GBP 21,250

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Nicolaes Knüpfer (Leipzig 1609-1655 Utrecht)
'Wine is Venus's Milk'
oil on panel
19½ x 23¾ in. (49.5 x 60.3 cm.)

(Probably) Daniel van Liebergen Paulizoon, Amsterdam, where recorded in an inventory of 1701, no. 8, 'In de zijkamer: Een Bachus en Venus van Knippert', and by bequest to
(Probably) Mechtelt van Liebergen, Amsterdam (named as beneficiary in the 1701 inventory).
(Probably) Anonymous sale [Property of Wreesman or Mensart]; Roos en Brondgeest, Amsteram, 17 August 1818, lot 33 (fl. 16.10 to Gruiter).
J. de Kuyper, Rotterdam, 1896.
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 4 July 1986, lot 39.
with Müllenmeister, Solingen, 1989, from whom acquired by the present owner.

Specialist note

The subject was identified by Kuznetzov as the humerous Baccanalian parable in which the nature of love is parodied with the suggestion that Venus, here as the personification of love, is sustained by wine above all things. It was popularised in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century by Jacob Cats' Toneel, and is an irreverent quotation from Terence's The Eunuch - 'Sine Baccho et Cerere friget Venus'.
Knupfer treated the theme in two other works - a painting on copper, sold in Paris in 1995 (Drouot, 12 December 1995, lot 5), and a drawing in the Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig (see Saxton, loc. cit., nos. 51 and D22).