Diego Velázquez, 'The Toilet of Venus ('The Rokeby Venus')', 1647-51

The Toilet of Venus ('The Rokeby Venus')

Diego Velázquez

Room 30

About the work

Overview

Venus, the goddess of love, reclines languidly on her bed, the curve of her body echoed in the sweep of sumptuous satin fabric. The pearly tones of her smooth skin contrast with the rich colours and lively brushstrokes of the curtain and sheets.

Venus‘ face is reflected in the mirror held up by her son, Cupid, but her reflection is blurred – we can’t see who she really is. Perhaps Velázquez wanted to make sure that Venus – the personification of female beauty – was not an identifiable person; we have to ‘complete’ her features with our imagination. Cupid’s face and far leg are very loosely painted and appear almost unfinished: Velázquez deliberately used a sketchy style in order to focus our attention on Venus.

This is Velázquez’s only surviving female nude and one of his most celebrated works. Its nickname, ‘The Rokeby Venus’, originates from Rokeby Park, a country house in County Durham, where the painting hung for much of the nineteenth century.

In-depth

This is the only surviving female nude painted by Velázquez. The subject was rare in seventeenth-century Spain, where overtly sensual images were met with disapproval by the Catholic Church. In spite of this the king, and wealthy Spanish art collectors in his circle, did own mythological paintings depicting nudes by artists such as Rubens and Titian.

Venus, the goddess of love, reclines languidly on her bed, the curve of her body echoed in the sweep of sumptuous satin fabric beneath her, which was originally more purple than grey in tone. Cupid, her son, holds a mirror up to her, its intertwining pink ribbons – used to hang it on a wall – knotted at the top. The way these ribbons cross Cupid’s wrist may allude to a blindfold, one of his attributes, or to the shackles he used to bind the hearts of lovers.

Venus‘ reflection is blurred: we can’t see who she really is. Perhaps Velázquez wanted to make sure that the goddess – the personification of female beauty – was not an identifiable person; we have to ‘complete’ her features with our imagination. Velázquez originally painted Venus‘ head slightly more in profile so that her nose was visible, but he later changed his mind; perhaps he thought that this would give too much away. That we view this woman from behind and cannot see her face clearly in the mirror is part of what makes the image so intriguing.

The glowing, pearly tones Velázquez has used for Venus’ smooth skin contrast with the rich colours and lively brushstrokes of the curtain and sheets. Cupid’s face and far leg are very loosely painted and appear almost unfinished: Velázquez deliberately used a sketchy style in order to focus our attention on Venus.

Paintings of the naked Venus had been made popular by sixteenth-century Venetian painters, especially Giorgione and Titian. Here Velázquez has merged two traditional representations of the goddess – one of Venus ‘at her toilet’, where she is normally shown sitting upright on a bed, looking at herself in a mirror, and another of her reclining, usually in a landscape. The result here is an image of astonishing originality.

We are not sure when and where the painting was made. It has been variously dated to before, during and after Velázquez’s second trip to Italy (1649–51). It does seem to be the painting listed in a household inventory of 1651 of the Spanish painter and art dealer Domingo Guerra Coronel, where it is not said to be by Velázquez and is described simply as ‘a nude woman’ (‘una muger desnuda’). Soon afterwards the painting was purchased by renowned art collector Gaspar de Haro, 7th Marqués del Carpio y de Heliche, in whose collection it was paired with a sixteenth-century Venetian picture of a naked nymph in a landscape, seen from the front. It hung in a large room alongside other mythological paintings and copies of works in the Spanish royal collection, to which Gaspar had privileged access thanks to his close relationship with Philip IV.

In 1687 the painting was inherited by Gaspar’s daughter, Catalina Méndez de Haro, who married Francisco Álvarez de Toledo, 10th Duke of Alba, shortly thereafter. It remained in his family’s prestigious collection until the early nineteenth century when Charles IV of Spain ordered the Duchess of Alba to sell the painting – and other works – to Don Manuel Godoy, his favourite minister. Godoy hung ‘The Rokeby Venus’ alongside Correggio’s Venus and Mercury with Cupid and Goya’s The Nude Maja and The Clothed Maja (both Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) in a very private room (described by a contemporary as a ‘gavinete interior’) – it must have been one of the most remarkable cabinets of female nudes in all of Spain.

This painting takes its nickname, ‘The Rokeby Venus’, from Rokeby Park, a country house in County Durham, where it hung for much of the nineteenth century. Since its arrival and public display at the National Gallery in 1906, the painting has become one of Velázquez’s most celebrated works. It continues to inspire both artists and writers, and has been the subject of novels, films, documentaries, artworks and installations.

Key facts

Details

Full title: The Toilet of Venus ('The Rokeby Venus')
Artist: Diego Velázquez
Artist dates: 1599 - 1660
Date made: 1647-51
Medium and support: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 122.5 × 177 cm
Acquisition credit: Presented by the Art Fund, 1906
Inventory number: NG2057
Location: Room 30
Collection: Main Collection
Frame: 17th-century Italian Frame

Provenance

It first appears in the inventory of the possessions of Don Gaspar Méndez de Haro, Marqués del Carpio and de Heliche, in Madrid, June 1651; it was apparently listed among the possessions of the Marquesa del Carpio in 1669. It is not certain whether the painting was in the collection of pictures belonging to Don Gaspar sent from Rome to Naples in 1682 and still in Naples in 1688. Don Gaspar died in 1687 and the picture passed to his daughter, Doña Catalina Méndez de Haro y Guzmán, who married the 10th Duke of Alba in 1688; it remained in the Alba collection until after the death in 1802 of Doña María Teresa Cayetana de Silva, Duchess of Alba, when her heirs sold it by order of Charles IV to the Queen’s favourite, Don Manuel Godoy, Principe de la Paz. It was bought between October, 1808 and September, 1813, by G. A. Wallis for W. Buchanan, and brought by him to England in September, 1813; in January, 1814, it was apparently in the possession of George Yeates and was sold shortly afterwards to John Bacon Sawrey Morritt. In the Morritt collection, Rokeby, Yorkshire; Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester, 1857 (provisional catalogue, no. 1079; definitive catalogue, no. 787); exhibited Royal Academy, 1890 (no. 135). Sold by H. E. Morritt in 1905; exhibited at Messrs. Agnew’s in 1905 (no. 9) and purchased from them by the National Art-Collections Fund, by whom presented to the Gallery in 1906. National Art-Collections Fund Exhibition, National Gallery, 1945/6 (no. 6); Arts Council Spanish Paintings Exhibition, 1947 (no. 30). Exhibited, Madrid, Velázquez y lo velazqueño, 1961 (no. 76).

Additional information

Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section of the catalogue entry in Neil MacLaren, revised by Allan Braham, ‘National Gallery Catalogues: The Spanish School’, London 1988; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.

Exhibition history

2014

Velázquez Exhibition

Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien

27 October 2014 - 15 February 2015

Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais

25 March 2015 - 13 July 2015
2024

National Treasures

Walker Art Gallery

10 May 2024 - 26 August 2024

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2002

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2002

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2007

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2008

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2009

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About this record

If you know more about this painting or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

Images

Insights

Since the National Gallery acquired Diego Velázquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ in 1906, it has become one of the most popular paintings in our collection. But who is the mysterious Venus looking at and what do we know about the origins of this work by the greatest painter of 17th century Spain? Find out all this and more with Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, Associate Curator of Paintings 1600-1800, as she walks us through the surprising history of the only surviving nude by Velázquez.

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