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A cleanshaven man in a saffron-yellow cloak runs and points to a nude woman whose fingers are turning into leafy tree branches in this horizontal painting. The woman is supported by an elderly man with a long beard and a winged young child all gathered around an oversized urn. The people all have pale rosy or tanned skin. To our right, the young man runs toward the woman to our left. His cloak wraps around his hips and flies out behind him. He wears a laurel wreath nestled in his blond hair, which is surrounded by a gold glow. A quiver of arrows hangs from one hip, and he wears sandals but is otherwise nude. He points to the woman with his right hand, on our left, with that foot raised. The blond, nude woman sits on the urn and lies back on a white cloth supported by a nude boy with short white wings. Her back is to us, and she looks to our right in profile. The fingers of her raised hands morph into muted green leaves. One of her legs bends over the arm of an old man who sits next to the urn and hooks one arm over its round body. The man’s head is topped with dark green material, like reeds, and he has a long white beard. His skin is ruddy, and his body is muscular. The urn’s opening faces us, and water pours onto the scarlet-red cloth that drapes across the old man’s hips and pools on the dirt ground around him. A spade with a long, wooden handle and a long, narrow blade lies on the ground before him. Evergreen trees grow up the left side of the scene, which appears to take place at the top of a mountain, for we look down into a dense forest beyond. A hazy blue mountain in the deep distance points up to the topaz-blue sky spanned with thin layers of gray-white clouds. The artist signed the lower left, “Gio. B. Tiepolo.”
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A cleanshaven man in a saffron-yellow cloak runs and points to a nude woman whose fingers are turning into leafy tree branches in this horizontal painting. The woman is supported by an elderly man with a long beard and a winged young child all gathered around an oversized urn. The people all have pale rosy or tanned skin. To our right, the young man runs toward the woman to our left. His cloak wraps around his hips and flies out behind him. He wears a laurel wreath nestled in his blond hair, which is surrounded by a gold glow. A quiver of arrows hangs from one hip, and he wears sandals but is otherwise nude. He points to the woman with his right hand, on our left, with that foot raised. The blond, nude woman sits on the urn and lies back on a white cloth supported by a nude boy with short white wings. Her back is to us, and she looks to our right in profile. The fingers of her raised hands morph into muted green leaves. One of her legs bends over the arm of an old man who sits next to the urn and hooks one arm over its round body. The man’s head is topped with dark green material, like reeds, and he has a long white beard. His skin is ruddy, and his body is muscular. The urn’s opening faces us, and water pours onto the scarlet-red cloth that drapes across the old man’s hips and pools on the dirt ground around him. A spade with a long, wooden handle and a long, narrow blade lies on the ground before him. Evergreen trees grow up the left side of the scene, which appears to take place at the top of a mountain, for we look down into a dense forest beyond. A hazy blue mountain in the deep distance points up to the topaz-blue sky spanned with thin layers of gray-white clouds. The artist signed the lower left, “Gio. B. Tiepolo.”

National Gallery of Art · Painting

Apollo Pursuing Daphne

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

Date
c. 1755/1760
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 68.5 x 87 cm (26 15/16 x 34 1/4 in.) framed: 88.3 x 105.7 x 5.7 cm (34 3/4 x 41 5/8 x 2 1/4 in.)
Classification
Painting
Accession number
1952.5.78
Credit line
Samuel H. Kress Collection
Time span
1751 to 1775
Department
CIS-B
Original NGA record Wikidata

Subjects and terms

  • painted surface
  • Baroque
  • Venetian
  • classical
  • mythology
  • Apollo
  • Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
  • Daphne
Provenance

Friedrich Jakob Gsell, Vienna, after 1849; (his sale, held by Georg Plach at the Künstlerhaus, Vienna, 14 March 1872, no 506b).[1] M. de Villars, Paris; (his sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 1 May 1874, no. 85). Édouard Kann, Paris.[2] Mme D[elaney]; (her sale, Galerie Jean Charpentier, Paris, 9 June 1933, no. 28); purchased by (Fort).[3] Pierre Lauth, Paris.[4] (sale, Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 23 May 1950, no. 28).[5] (Rosenberg and Stiebel, New York); purchased 1950 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[6] gift 1952 to NGA. [1] In his introduction to the sale catalogue, Plach explained that Gsell began collecting pictures in 1849 and made his first large purchase at the sale of Baron Samuel von Festetits, Artaria, Vienna, 11 April, 2 May and following, 1850. The painting does not appear in the Festetits catalogue, which was checked by Elspeth Hector, head of the library at the National Gallery in London. [2] According to _Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection, Acquired by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation 1945-1951_, Washington, D.C., 1951: 158. [3] The sale catalogue identifies the painting as "appartenant à Mme D." Kress 1951: 158, lists a Mme Delaney as the next owner after Kann. A marginal notation in the Knoedler Microfiche copy of the catalogue gives the purchaser as Fort, apparently a dealer. [4] Lauth's ownership is recorded only in Kress 1951: 158. He may have been the seller in the subsequent sale. [5] Fern Rusk Shapley, _Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools XVI-XVIII Century_, London, 1973: 149, and Fern Rusk Shapley, _Catalogue of Italian Paintings_, 2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1979: 1:449, misidentified the owner as M.G., who included only porcelain in this sale. [6] According to Kress 1951: 158, Shapley 1973: 149, and Shapley 1979: 1:449. See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/305.

Inscription

lower left: Gio. B. Tiepolo

NGA object ID 41693. Collection metadata is reproduced under CC0. This work is included because its NGA published-image record is marked open access; visitors should recheck the source record before substantial reuse.