Hendrick Bloemaert

Anonymous sale, Paris, Delorme & Collin du Bocage, 21 March 2007, lot 17.

The subject of Vertumnus and Pomona is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses (14.642). Pomona, the goddess of gardens whose devotion to nature left no time for love, was courted by Vertumnus in a variety of disguises, including, as here, that of an old woman, in which guise he finally gained her confidence.

The subject's widespread popularity in the North was due in large measure to Hendrick's father, Abraham Bloemaert (1564-1651), whose first and most famous painting of the subject was widely popularised by Jan Saenredam's pioneering engraving of 1605.¹ His son Hendrick also took up the theme on several occasions. His earliest recorded depiction of Vertumnus and Pomona, a signed and dated canvas of 1635, is today in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.² The present painting reprises a later composition of 1638 sold in these Rooms, 11 July 2002, lot 128, and employs a very similar design.³ Both these works by Hendrick are, however, closer in design to his father's later treatments⁴ of the subject rather than his first and the corresponding Saenredam print. Gone is the wider representation of Pomona's orchard, and Vertumnus has been relegated to the middle distance. Pomona is now depicted as a type of Arcadian shepherdess, as opposed to the mannerist nymph of the earlier images. Hendrick has honoured the Ovidian text with lively representation of details mentioned in the story, for example the abundance of fruit that lays about Pomona's feet, her pruning-hook balanced between the fingers of her left hand, the perforated jug used to water her plants, and the staff and veiled head of the approaching old woman that is Vertumnus in disguise. Hendrick has even included behind Pomona the fence with which, as Ovid wrote, she 'fenced her orchard and stayed inside it to shun and forestall all contact with men'. The fence is now lopsided and split, leaving an opening for the impending arrival of Vertumnus and foreshadowing Pomona's eventual surrender to his petitions. 

1. See M. Roethlisberger, Abraham Bloemaert and his sons, Doornspijk 1993, vol. II, no. 109 and no. 151.

2. Roethlisberger 1993, vol. I, p. 469, cat. no. H60, reproduced vol. II, no. H62.

3. Sold, London, Sotheby's, 11 July 2002, lot 128.

4. Roethlisberger 1993, vol. II, no. 187 and no. 413.