After Adriaen de Vries, 'Girl Bathing', about 1700-50
About the work
Overview
This sculpture is a copy of a bronze thought to be by Adriaen de Vries (now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig). De Vries was born in The Hague, trained in the workshop of Giambologna in Florence and worked in Italy, then Augsburg, Germany and Prague.
The bronze dates to about 1600, but this marble version was probably made in Italy in the first half of the eighteenth century. This pose is typical of classical images of the goddess Venus bathing, and it may stem originally from a marble sculpture of Venus washing her foot made in the second century AD (Uffizi Gallery, Florence). Giambologna’s workshop produced several similar versions which de Vries would have seen, and there are also similarities to one of the bronze figures around the Hercules Fountain in Augsburg, which is by de Vries.
The sculptor of the National Gallery’s sculpture has not copied the original pedestal of the Braunschweig version, which looks inappropriately small for the figure and was cast separately.
Key facts
Details
- Full title
- Girl Bathing
- Artist
- After Adriaen de Vries
- Artist dates
- about 1545 - 1626
- Date made
- about 1700-50
- Medium and support
- marble, carved
- Dimensions
- 49 × 24 × 29 cm
- Acquisition credit
- Bought, 1966
- Inventory number
- NG6378
- Location
- Not on display
- Collection
- Main Collection
Provenance
Additional information
Text extracted from the catalogue entry in Christopher Baker and Tom Henry, ‘The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue’, London 2001; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.
Bibliography
-
2001
C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001
About this record
If you know more about this work 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.