Summary

Sculpture, bronze; Cupid flying through the air; after a model by François Duquesnoy, Italy, Rome; c. 1650-1700. Cupid, the god of love, is shown flying through the air about to fire into unsuspecting humans his arrows of love from his bow, which is now missing. The model was invented by the Italo-Flemish sculptor François Duquesnoy, who worked for the greater part of his career in Rome, and who became famous already during his lifetime and even more after his death for his numerous images of cavorting and gambolling small boys (putti). The model for the Ickworth Cupid was developed by the artist around 1630 for a medium-sized bronze group depicting the god Apollo with Cupid, whilst the figure of Cupid is also found as an independent statuette. The Ickworth figure is one of a small number of casts of a reversed version of Duquesnoy's model. It is very beautifully modelled, for example in the feathers of the wings or the modulations of the boy’s flesh. The tree trunk support, although slightly ungainly, may well be original to the sculpture.

Full description

A figure of the winged Cupid, god of love, flying through the air, with his left arm held out to hold the bow, now missing, whilst his right hand opens in a gesture of surprise. Tousled hair. The figure is attached by a screw to a tree stump. Mounted on a rectangular ebonized wooden base. Extensive remains of a dark-brown lacquer. This work, in which the figure, attached to a tree stump, appears oddly isolated, may be a fragment from a larger assemblage, which perhaps originally included a separately made figure of Cupid's mother, Venus. But it is a powerful figure, so may be in its original form. In its present form it depicts the infant Cupid, god of love, flying through the air and firing an arrow from his bow (now lost), towards one of his victims. Cupid would fire golden arrows into those he had chosen to fall in love, but lead for those destined to form aversions to another individual. The figure of Cupid is a cast of a model invented by the brilliant but short-lived Italo-Flemish sculptor François Duquesnoy (1597-1643). Duquesnoy was born in Brussels, the son of the established sculptor Jérôme Du Quesnoy the Elder (c. 1570-1641/42), with whom he trained, alongside his brother Jérôme Du Quesnoy the Younger (1602-1654). In 1618 François travelled to Rome on a bursary granted him by the Habsburg Archduke Albert, but after Albert’s death in 1621, he was forced to find ways to make an independent living. As well as making religious sculptures for a range of patrons, Duquesnoy restored a number of classical sculptures. In 1624 he is recorded as sharing a house with his close friend the painter Nicolas Poussin. The two young men made extensive studies together of the ancient monuments and sculptures to be seen in Rome, as well as more modern works, including Titian’s Bacchanals, then in the Aldobrandini collection. These three famous paintings (among them the Bacchus and Ariadne now in the National Gallery, London), as well as relief sculptures on antique sarcophagi, seem to have been the principal inspirations for the reliefs of gambolling small boys (putti) and the little independent figures that Duquesnoy began to make from around 1625, together with Nicolas Poussin. Duquesnoy's early biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori wrote of how ‘Titian expressed admirably putti of a more tender age and surpassed all others in delicacy. François fell in love with them and translated them into various groups in mezzo relievo, and together with Nicolas Poussin modelled them in clay.’ From the later 1620s also dates Duquesnoy’s masterpiece in monumental sculpture, the marble statue of Saint Susanna (Rome, S Maria di Loreto; casts at Kedleston and Stourhead, NT 108992 and 562915). Like Poussin, Duquesnoy was subjected to enormous pressure from the French King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu to leave Rome, in order to work at the French court in Paris. After many delays he set out in 1643, but died on the journey. Duquesnoy’s reputation if anything grew after his death. Already during his lifetime his models were copied and adapted and may be seen used in paintings, including early paintings by his friend Nicolas Poussin. Putti in the style of Duquesnoy continued to be popular into the eighteenth century, particularly in Paris.. Duquesnoy’s popularity probably reached its apex during the eighteenth century, with his sculptures, including his little putti, being highly sought after and frequently copied and adapted. Two fine seventeenth-century casts of putti in wax are at Ham House (NT 1139598.1 & 2). King Charles I owned a little terracotta model of a sleeping Cupid that had been bought in Rome; in the c. 1638-39 inventory of the royal collections in Whitehall Palace, the artist was described as 'Francisco fiammingo' and as in competition with the great Roman sculptor Bernini. Duquesnoy’s name, simplified to ‘François Flamand’ or ‘Il Fiammingo’, is found constantly in London and Paris auction catalogues from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Apart from casts of putti, there are only a few bronze figural compositions that can be associated with François Duquesnoy. They include a group of medium-sized statuettes of lithe naked figures of the gods Apollo and Mercury (Boudon-Machuel 2005, pp. 90-96, pp. 263-71, In. 53-55; Lingo 2007, pp. 33-42). The original bronze figure of Mercury is now lost but, according to Duquesnoy’s early biographer Pietro Bellori, was made for a well-known Roman collector, the marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani, as a pendant to a Roman bronze figure of the god Hercules. It depicted Mercury standing and holding his caduceus, whilst a putto seated at his feet was engaged in tying the god’s wings to his ankles. Bellori went on to write that Duquesnoy subsequently made an Apollo with Cupid as a pendant to the Mercury, with Apollo in the pose of the statue known as the Belvedere Antinous (Haskell and Penny 1981 and 2024, no. 4). The finest complete versions of this group are the examples in the Liechtenstein collection (Liechtenstein 1985, no. 50) and the Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid (Coppel and Herrero Sanz 2009, no.38). The figures in the group are mounted on a rectangular base from which emerges a tall tree stump; Cupid is depicted not flying but skipping along the ground, his right leg and right hand raised, looking up to his right towards Apollo, whilst in his left hand was his bow, now lost in all surviving versions. The figure of Cupid in the Apollo and Cupid groups is fixed to the tree trunk, by means of a screw through the right wing. In essence, the Ickworth Cupid is almost identical to this figure, also in size, except that it is modelled in reverse, with the head turned to the left, the left leg raised and the left hand held up in surprise. The Cupid figures are also found without the Apollo, in statuettes in which he balanced on his right foot (Boudon-Machuel 2005, pp. 327-28, in. 119), examples including a version in the Torrie Collection at the University of Edinburgh (Inv. EU0644). The Ickworth bronze belongs to a small group in which the model is in reverse. The group includes figures originally holding a bow as at Ickworth, sold in Paris in 1976 and in London in 1992 (Palais Galliera, 9 April 1976, lot 23; Christie’s, 8 December 1992, lot 107; Boudon-Machuel 2005, nos. In.119.8 and 119.7), and others in which the figure of Cupid blows on a curved horn held in his left hand, examples formerly in the Staatliche Museen Berlin (Bange 1923, p. 37, no. M. 35), the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (Vermeule, Cahn, Hadley 1977, pp. 153-54, no. 190). There also exist two drawings showing Duquesnoy’s model in this direction (Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie; Christie’s London, 2 July 1996, lot 201. Boudon-Machuel 2005, nos. In. 119 dér. 1 & 2). The Ickworth Cupid is the only currently known use of Duquesnoy's spirited and versatile model to create a figure flying through the air. It was clearly made as such and is not an adaptation of another formerly standing figure. The figure of Cupid is extremely well-modelled, for example in the individualised feathers of the wings, or the child’s tousled hair. So it would seem to be among the better versions of what was evidently a highly influential model and very likely to have been cast in Rome and relatively early, probably in the decades following Duquesnoy's death. The tree stump is rather less good, indeed rather crude when compared with those in the Liechtenstein and Madrid versions of the Apollo and Cupid group. But it is not necessarily a subsequent addition, since it seems clear that the Ickworth Cupid was conceived from the first as a flying figure. The Dutch painter Michael Sweerts (1618-1664) who, like Duquesnoy, spent much of his career working in Rome, was evidently familiar with François Duquesnoy’s Apollo and Cupid group. In several paintings that he made of an artist’s studio, Sweerts included a pile of plaster casts of sculpture, mainly antiquities, but also the torsos of the figures of Apollo and Cupid (Yeager-Crasselt 2011). In particular, in Sweerts’s painting of an 'Artist’s Studio with a Woman Sewing' (Yeager-Crasselt 2011, fig. 4), the finest version of which was recently sold at auction for a record price (Christie’s London, 6 July 2023, lot 6), there appear two fragmentary torsos of the Cupid; the one sitting atop the heap of casts clearly shows the figure with the head turned to the left, as in the Ickworth bronze, providing further evidence for the association of this variant with Duquesnoy himself. Jeremy Warren July 2025