WILLIAM ETTY, R.A. | Venus relieving Cupid of his bow (or 'Venus disarming Cupid')

James Gresham (1836-1914), Gallery House, Woodheys Park, Ashton-on-Mersey, Cheshire;

With Gooden & Fox, London. 

York, Corporation Art Gallery, Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Wm. Etty, R.A., 20 February - 8 April 1911, no. 102 (lent by James Gresham Esq.);

Detroit Institute of Art (according to a label on the reverse).

A similar blond tonality and treatment of landscape characterise several subject pictures by Etty exhibited in the second half of the 1830s, while the figure of Venus is similar to that in his Mars, Venus and Cupid shown at the Royal Academy in 1837 (National Trust, Fairhaven Collection, Anglesey Abbey).¹

James Gresham, who lent this painting to the 1910 York exhibition, was the founder of the Salford-based engineering company Gresham & Craven, which made injectors for steam engines and braking equipment for trains, and was a noted patron of the arts. He was a major supporter of the Manchester sculptor John Cassidy, from whom he commissioned two of the artist’s most important works: Adrift and King Edward VII, both of which he presented to the City of Manchester.

Gresham also lent another painting by Etty to the 1911 York Corporation Art Gallery exhibition, entitled Youth and Pleasure (no. 121). This was almost certainly Etty's Phædria and Cymochles on the Idle Lake which later belonged to the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, until it was sold in 1958 and was more recently in the Forbes Collection. Gresham was a significant collector of nineteenth-century British paintings, active in the years around 1900, acquiring works from earlier generations as well as by contemporary artists. In addition to his two Ettys, he owned examples by Ford Madox Brown, William Powell Frith (multiple works), Daniel Maclise, Albert Moore, Henry Wallis and John William Waterhouse. His posthumous sale at Christie’s, held on 12 July 1917, probably included the present picture.

We are grateful to Richard Green for his assistance in the cataloguing of this lot. 

1 http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/515705