Venus and Anchises
Benjamin Robert Haydon
1826
Benjamin Robert Haydon was an aspiring history painter, and the subject of this painting was inspired by the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, in which the Greek goddess of love (her Roman counterpart being Venus) descended to Mount Ida disguised as a mortal to seduce the cowherd Anchises. While the artist based the figure of Venus on examples of ancient sculpture, he used his wife, Mary, as a model for the face of the goddess. Indeed, Haydon featured the likenesses of his family, friends, and himself in many of his paintings. However, this mingling of the real and the ideal in his historical compositions did not always sit well with the critics, and in this instance, one reviewer lamented the lack of ideal beauty in Haydon’s Venus, dismissing her as an “affected flirt, introduced as a goddess.”
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven · Image: Yale Center for British Art, Public domain · Text: Yale Center for British Art, CC0