Oil Painting, 'Three Cupids Playing Instruments', Hendrik Willem Schweickhardt, ca. 1775

Grisaille painting showing three cupids leaning over clouds and playing different instruments among which a guitar and a flute, some foliage overlaps the edges on the right hand side.

Bequeathed by John Jones

Bequeathed by John Jones, 1882
Ref : Parkinson, Ronald, Catalogue of British Oil Paintings 1820-1860. Victoria & Albert Museum, HMSO, London, 1990. p.xix-xx

John Jones (1800-1882) was first in business as a tailor and army clothier in London 1825, and opened a branch in Dublin 1840. Often visited Ireland, travelled to Europe and particularly France. He retired in 1850, but retained an interest in his firm. Lived quietly at 95 Piccadilly from 1865 to his death in January 1882. After the Marquess of Hertford and his son Sir Richard Wallace, Jones was the principal collector in Britain of French 18th century fine and decorative arts. Jones bequeathed an important collection of French 18th century furniture and porcelain to the V&A, and among the British watercolours and oil paintings he bequeathed to the V&A are subjects which reflect his interest in France.

See also South Kensington Museum Art Handbooks. The Jones Collection. With Portrait and Woodcuts. Published for the Committee of Council on Education by Chapman and Hall, Limited, 11, Henrietta Street. 1884.
Chapter I. Mr. John Jones. pp.1-7.
Chapter II. No.95, Piccadilly. pp.8-44. This gives a room-by-room guide to the contents of John Jones' house at No.95, Piccadilly.
Chapter VI. ..... Pictures,... and other things, p.138, "The pictures which are included in the Jones bequest are, with scarcely a single exception, valuable and good; and many of them excellent works of the artists. Mr. Jones was well pleased if he could collect enough pictures to ornament the walls of his rooms, and which would do no discredit to the extraordinary furniture and other things with which his house was filled."

Historical significance: This painting is a good example of Netherlandish 18th-century fashionable decorative panels which developed under the influence of the French Rococo style. Often called witjes in reference to the leading figure in this category, Jacob de Wit (1695-1754), these pieces usually show small figures placed in a mythological and allegorical context.
Formerly attributed to Dirk van der Aa (1731-1809), this work was reattributed to Hendrik Willem Schweickhardt by Charles Dumas (written communication, Feb. 2010), a painter who developed this type of subject adding in his grisaille technique pink and white hues, drawing thus upon the French Rococo’s taste, François Boucher (1703-1770) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806).
The subject matter is here difficult to identify: it may relate to an allegory of hearing as the little putti are playing different instruments while its counterpart could be an allegory of sight as the putti are showing flowers’ garlands to each other.
Schweickhardt seems to usually set his playful putti on clouds in a recurrent compositional scheme such as in an Allegory of Smell, dated 1780, and Allegory of taste, dated 1779, Private collection, The Netherlands.
This style shows also a taste of the Royal court in The Hague for French Rococo decorations.

Decorative paintings executed in the grisaille technique were known in the 18th-century Netherlands as witjes in reference to the leading figure in this category of painting, Jacob de Wit (1695-1754). These works usually imitate marble, plaster or stucco and enabled Dutch artists of that period to improve their decorations with the illusion of sculpture. These large-scale paintings originated in the Italian, French and Flemish art before the 17th century but developed in Holland during the second half of the 17th century thanks to the Flemish born painter Gérard de Lairesse (1640-1711) who was called by his contemporaries the 'Dutch Apelles' as well as the 'Dutch Poussin' and the 'Dutch Raphael'. After Lairesse's death, Jacob de Wit took over and developed this category of painting by creating grisaille paintings as overmantels (known as chimneypieces), overdoor panels, and as inserts bordering panels, which encountered a great success. Few 18th-century Dutch painters continued to create witjes, among whom the most eminent ones were Aert Schouman (1710-1792), Hendrik Willem Schweickhardt (1746-1797), Dirck van der Aa (1731-1809) and the brothers Abraham (1753-1826) and Jacob van Strij (1756-1815). The demand for such works of art diminished however rapidly after the middle of the century and a vogue for painted and then printed wallpaper that began at the beginning of the century also helped to change the fashion.

Fomerly attributed to Dirk van der Aa (1731-1805)

Hendrik Willem Schweickhardt (1746-1797) was a German painter who came to The Hague in 1775, where he was the pupil of Hieronymus Lapis (active 1758-1788). In 1885 he moved to London where he spent the rest of his life. He was the teacher of Pieter Gaal (1770-1819), Andrea Scacciati II (1725-1771) and of his own daughter Katharina Wilhelmina Schweickhardt (1776-1830).

This grisaille painting showing three cupids leaning over clouds and playing instruments could illustrates an allegory of hearing, a compositional idea that Schweickhardt used several times in his production of decorative panels. The artist especially favoured children and putti’s subject matters for these works as their subjects are purely decorative and recall an idyllic Arcadian world, a trend that also spread in French literature of the late 18th century. This painting forms a pair with 559-1882.

560-1882