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Lot Essay
Although nothing in the thriving, seventeenth-century tapestry world based in Brussels could equal in intellectual scope and in size Rubens’s Triumph of the Eucharist, it can be said that Jacob Jordaens surpassed the elder artist in the number and variety of the tapestry series he designed. Indeed as late as 2005 a newly discovered set was offered in these Rooms (10 November 2005, lot 193). The present lot is also a remarkable new discovery – one which adds to the number of works associated with the artist’s well-known account of the life, as it is known, but better described as the adventures, of Odysseus.
Jordaens was a cultivated and well-informed reader of his sources, in this case Homer’s Odyssey in which the Greek hero’s adventures are recounted on his long return from defeated Troy to Ithaca, where his wife Penelope patiently awaited him. Reading the epic in translation, the artist selected seven or possibly nine episodes to make up the series, whose protagonist was seen as an exemplar of duty and virtue. Rubens was an early admirer of the originality Jordaens brought to bear, for one design for the series was in his possession when he died in 1640 and was offered in the estate sale of his collection.
In this case the artist tested his well-educated and aristocratic audience – the likely purchasers of such a tapestry series – by selecting an episode in which Odysseus is notable for his absence. But the hero was no doubt the subject of the conversation at the table presided over by the ‘fair-tressed nymph’, the goddess Calypso. On reading the passage in Book V of the poem, Jordaens must have seen the potential of adapting his composition of The Satyr and the Peasant, which had already proved very popular. But now instead of the satyr he introduced Hermes sent by Zeus to obtain the release of Odysseus who had dallied long with the goddess. Homer relates how Hermes ‘came to a great cave wherein dwelt the fair-tressed nymph [...] Round about the cave grew a luxuriant wood [...] wherein birds long in wing were wont to rest [...] And right there about the hollow cave ran a trailing garden vine...’. Calypso recognised the god and as Homer continues, addressed him: ‘”Speak what is in thy mind [...] follow me further that I may set before thee entertainment.” So saying the goddess set before him a table laden with ambrosia and mixed the ruddy nectar. So he drank and ate...’.
Jordaens’s small modello of this episode is recorded in a Danish private collection (fig. 1). There the main focus is on the interaction between Hermes and Calypso, but the artist could not resist dwelling on the setting with a trailing vine and birds; indeed he has added a goat and sheep. Both parrot and goat, which recur in the present painting, were favourite denizens of the artist’s imagined world, although for the Brussels tapissier they were considered supernumerary and were omitted altogether in the extant examples of the tapestry itself.
One such tapestry measures over four metres square and is thus substantially larger than this apparently unrecorded version of the composition, while another is at the Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome (fig. 2). As with the case of the larger, more ambitious but also previously unknown Odysseus and Nausicaa, offered in these Rooms (4 December 2012, lot 18, £2,057,250) and now on loan to the Rijksmuseum, it is to be debated as to whether it should be seen as part of the process of designing the tapestry, or whether it was intended as a display piece for a prospective client or as an independent work of art executed as a ‘spin-off’. Of course these are not mutually exclusive. And whatever the case, Jordaens can be seen here considering the best means to render Hermes, seated raising his roemer to Calypso as the nectar is poured for his delectation. A large pentimento can be detected in the back of the god, where evidently his red drapery was first more voluminous. The artist has developed ideas earlier considered for another composition that showed Hermes seated at table, but brought to the fore has been his recollection of a pose devised much earlier by Rubens in his Judgment of Paris where the left arm is tensed to balance the figure’s forward thrust. The main light source is from the left so that it falls on Hermes’s back and illumines the two servants at the end of the table, but beyond is another serving woman whose face is in partial shade as her cheek is also lit by artificial light coming from within the cave. The creation of the Odysseus series is usually placed circa 1635, making it his second great tapestry enterprise, and it seems reasonable to assign a similar date to the present picture.
Jordaens was a cultivated and well-informed reader of his sources, in this case Homer’s Odyssey in which the Greek hero’s adventures are recounted on his long return from defeated Troy to Ithaca, where his wife Penelope patiently awaited him. Reading the epic in translation, the artist selected seven or possibly nine episodes to make up the series, whose protagonist was seen as an exemplar of duty and virtue. Rubens was an early admirer of the originality Jordaens brought to bear, for one design for the series was in his possession when he died in 1640 and was offered in the estate sale of his collection.
In this case the artist tested his well-educated and aristocratic audience – the likely purchasers of such a tapestry series – by selecting an episode in which Odysseus is notable for his absence. But the hero was no doubt the subject of the conversation at the table presided over by the ‘fair-tressed nymph’, the goddess Calypso. On reading the passage in Book V of the poem, Jordaens must have seen the potential of adapting his composition of The Satyr and the Peasant, which had already proved very popular. But now instead of the satyr he introduced Hermes sent by Zeus to obtain the release of Odysseus who had dallied long with the goddess. Homer relates how Hermes ‘came to a great cave wherein dwelt the fair-tressed nymph [...] Round about the cave grew a luxuriant wood [...] wherein birds long in wing were wont to rest [...] And right there about the hollow cave ran a trailing garden vine...’. Calypso recognised the god and as Homer continues, addressed him: ‘”Speak what is in thy mind [...] follow me further that I may set before thee entertainment.” So saying the goddess set before him a table laden with ambrosia and mixed the ruddy nectar. So he drank and ate...’.
Jordaens’s small modello of this episode is recorded in a Danish private collection (fig. 1). There the main focus is on the interaction between Hermes and Calypso, but the artist could not resist dwelling on the setting with a trailing vine and birds; indeed he has added a goat and sheep. Both parrot and goat, which recur in the present painting, were favourite denizens of the artist’s imagined world, although for the Brussels tapissier they were considered supernumerary and were omitted altogether in the extant examples of the tapestry itself.
One such tapestry measures over four metres square and is thus substantially larger than this apparently unrecorded version of the composition, while another is at the Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome (fig. 2). As with the case of the larger, more ambitious but also previously unknown Odysseus and Nausicaa, offered in these Rooms (4 December 2012, lot 18, £2,057,250) and now on loan to the Rijksmuseum, it is to be debated as to whether it should be seen as part of the process of designing the tapestry, or whether it was intended as a display piece for a prospective client or as an independent work of art executed as a ‘spin-off’. Of course these are not mutually exclusive. And whatever the case, Jordaens can be seen here considering the best means to render Hermes, seated raising his roemer to Calypso as the nectar is poured for his delectation. A large pentimento can be detected in the back of the god, where evidently his red drapery was first more voluminous. The artist has developed ideas earlier considered for another composition that showed Hermes seated at table, but brought to the fore has been his recollection of a pose devised much earlier by Rubens in his Judgment of Paris where the left arm is tensed to balance the figure’s forward thrust. The main light source is from the left so that it falls on Hermes’s back and illumines the two servants at the end of the table, but beyond is another serving woman whose face is in partial shade as her cheek is also lit by artificial light coming from within the cave. The creation of the Odysseus series is usually placed circa 1635, making it his second great tapestry enterprise, and it seems reasonable to assign a similar date to the present picture.