Lucretia
Caspar Netscher(Prague or Heidelberg ca. 1639 – 1684 TheHague)ca. 1665–67
oil on panel
28.8 x 24.3 cm
CN-109© 2020 The Leiden Collection

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How to cite
Wieseman, Marjorie E. “Lucretia” (2017). In The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 2nd ed. Edited by Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr. New York, 2017–20. https://theleidencollection.com/artwork/lucretia/ (archived May 2020).
A PDF of every version of this entry is available in this Online Catalogue's Archive, and the Archive ismanaged by a permanent URL. New versions are added only when a substantive change to the narrativeoccurs.

The story of the Roman heroine Lucretia is recounted by Livy.[1] The beautiful

Comparative Figures

wife of Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, a Roman nobleman of the sixth century
B.C., Lucretia was renowned for her virtue and loyalty. She was raped bySextus Tarquinius, son of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the tyrannicalEtruscan king of Rome. Lucretia revealed the defilement before her father,husband, and other male relatives and then—to preserve her honor and thegood name of her family—committed suicide by stabbing herself in the breast.
To avenge the rape, one of Lucretia’s kinsman, Lucius Junius Brutus, led a
revolt to overthrow the monarchy. Brutus and Lucretia’s bereaved husband,
Collatinus, subsequently became the first consuls of the Roman Republic.
Lucretia’s tragic and emotionally complex story came to exemplify anequally complex array of abstract concepts: patriotism and the victory ofliberty over tyranny; love and faithfulness unto death; and virtuous female
chastity most of all. Historical reaction to the Roman heroine was notconsistently positive, however, and early Christian writers tended tocondemn her for choosing the mortal sin of suicide over the lesser evil ofFig 1. Lucas Cranach, Lucretia,1533, oil on panel, 37 x 24 cm,
Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Inv. No.
1832

adultery. Nonetheless, the story of a woman who chose death over dishonor
was steadily popular in a culture that placed such great emphasis on female
chastity.[2] Representations of Lucretia’s suicide abounded in early sixteenthcentury paintings and prints, especially among Northern European artists:
Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Baldung, Jan van Scorel, Joos vanCleve, Jan Gossaert, and Pieter Coecke van Aelst were among the many
that depicted the theme. The majority of these images removed Lucretia froma narrative context and isolated her figure against a neutral background, thus
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promoting a greater sense of intimacy between the figure and the viewer (fig1). Although Livy and other classical authors described Lucretia as“modestly clothed,” most of these images show her either partially clad orcompletely nude, perhaps prompted by the recent discovery in Rome of an
antique statue of a nude woman believed to represent Lucretia.[3]The isolation of the figure and the exclusion of narrative context in theseimages have been linked to the conventions of Christian devotional imagery,which employed similar formal strategies to focus the viewer’s meditations
on the sufferings of Christ or the particular saint depicted, and thus
encourage empathetic response.[4] Adopting these conventions was only
logical, as Lucretia herself was often regarded as a sort of secular martyr.
Unquestionably, however, the voyeuristic appeal of intimate engagementwith a (semi)nude woman—no matter how noble or virtuous—and the illicit
eroticism of Lucretia’s rape were the key factors in the continued popularity

Fig 2. Guido Reni, Lucretia, ca.
1625, oil on canvas, 215 x 151 cm,
Staatliche Schlösser und Gärten,Neues Palais, PotsdamSanssouci, inv. GK I 5388of the theme.
It is not surprising that Caspar Netscher chose the story of Lucretia for what
was probably his first attempt at a historical subject. Although Gary Schwartz
and others have convincingly proposed that Rembrandt’s intensely
charged Lucretia paintings of 1664 and 1666 might have been inspired bycontemporary political events and the concomitant parallels drawn between
the foundation of the Roman and Dutch Republics,[5] it is not at all clear that
Netscher intended his painting, made during this same period, to embody
similar associations. Like many genre painters who also turned their hand topainting small-scale history pieces during the 1660s and 1670s (FM-103), hechose a well-known subject that lent itself to a genre-like approach in termsof clothing, setting and accessories, and that afforded an opportunity todepict a voluptuous semi-clad figure under a cloak of historicalFig 3. Caspar Netscher, Woman at
Her Toilet, ca. 1665, oil on panel,
42.5 x 33 cm, Private Collection,London, courtesy Johnny Van
Haeften Ltd.

respectability.[6] Here, posed before a curtained bed in a darkened interior,
Lucretia bares her breast to receive the dagger’s thrust, her tear-filled eyesrolled heavenwards. In general terms, Netscher’s decision to isolate thefigure before a barely visible background recalls the sensuous Lucretias
created by sixteenth-century Northern artists, but the sharp turn of thefigure’s head and her pathetic upward gaze seem to have been more
directly inspired by Guido Reni’s numerous depictions of Lucretia and theequally tragic Cleopatra (fig 2).[7] In both instances, the artist has deliberatelyeliminated any possibility of eye contact between figure and viewer, allowing
the viewer to intrude freely upon an intensely private scene. In analyzing thevoyeuristic appeal of Reni’s paintings specifically, Richard Spear has notedthat the eroticism of his Lucretias “derives less from nakedness than from© 2020 The Leiden Collection

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their vulnerability and the violation done to them: from the pending plunge ofa cold, sharp dagger into pale unblemished flesh.”[8] The same might be saidof Netscher’s Lucretia as well.
Lucretia, which is in good condition, was probably painted about
1665–67.[9] The same model appears in Netscher’s genre paintings of themid-1660s (fig 3), many of which project a similar sensual and sensorial
appeal. In these works, Netscher often combined discreet glimpses into
private domestic worlds with a detailed attention to the tactile surfaces offabric and flesh (see also CN-108). Were it not for Lucretia’s artfully
disheveled garments and the slim dagger clutched in her outstretched hand,she could easily be mistaken for one of these pampered seventeenth-century
beauties. By limiting accessories to a generous swag of green drapery and apillow hinting at the presence of a bed in the right background, Netscher
avoids tying his representation to a specific time and place. Some havefaulted Netscher’s history paintings for lacking a certain dignified historicism;the nineteenth-century critic Charles Blanc, for example, remarked, “thenotion of the antique, the sublime conventions which form the ideal in art,
were too elevated for his spirit. . . . [He] did not forego [using] some pretty
Hague lady as the model for his Cleopatra, or Cleopatra herself as thepretext for a beautiful satin robe.”[10] Nevertheless, the very contemporaneityof Netscher’s Lucretia is what contributes most significantly to her sensualappeal.

- Marjorie E. Wieseman, 2017

© 2020 The Leiden Collection

Lucretia
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1. Livy (Titus Livius), The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt (London, 1960),
98–99. The story is also told by Ovid (Fasti II: 721–853); see Ian Donaldson, The Rapes ofLucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford, 1982), 5–8.
2. Carol Schuler, “Virtuous Model/Voluptuous Martyr: The Suicide of Lucretia in Northern
Renaissance Art and Its Relationship to Late Medieval Devotional Imagery,” in Saints,Sinners and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed.
Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart (Aldershot, 2003), 7–25.
3. Wolfgang Stechow, “Lucretia Statua,” in Essays in Honor of Georg Swarzenski, ed. Oswald
Goetz (Chicago, 1951), 114–24. Another, more emotionally charged and less overtly erotic
tradition exists in depictions of the theme by Titian and other Venetian painters, culminating inRembrandt’s remarkable and intensely moving late paintings of Lucretia from 1664 (NationalGallery of Art, Washington D.C.) and 1666 (Minneapolis Institute of Art).
4. Carol Schuler, “Virtuous Model/Voluptuous Martyr: The Suicide of Lucretia in Northern
Renaissance Art and Its Relationship to Late Medieval Devotional Imagery,” in Saints,Sinners and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed.
Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart (Aldershot, 2003), 7–25.
5. Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (New York, 1985), 330; see also Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr., The Collection of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogues: Dutch
Paintings of the Seventeenth Century (Washington, D.C., 1995), 283.
6. Marjorie E. Wieseman, Caspar Netscher and Late Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting(Doornspijk, 2002), 75–77; on the blurring of the distinction between genre and history, seeespecially Lyckle de Vries, “Jan Steen zwischen Genre- und Historienmalerei,”
Niederdeutsch Beitragen zur Kunstgeschichte 22 (1982): 113–28.
7. Reni’s depictions of Cleopatra and Lucretia were exceedingly popular throughout Europe,and a number of contemporary copies survive, as well as engravings after the compositions.
A Lucretia by Reni was in the sale Johan Cau, Lord of Domberg, Amsterdam, 7 May 1710;
see Gerard Hoet, Catalogus of naamlyst van schilderyen, met derzelver pryzen, zedert een
langen reeks van jaaren zoo, 3 vols. (The Hague, 1752), 1 :137.
8. Richard E. Spear, The “Divine” Guido: Religion, Sex, Money, and Art in the World of Guido
Reni (New Haven, 1997), 85.
9. From at least 1953 until 1999, when it was cleaned and restored, the painting was attributed
to Jacob Ochtervelt on the basis of a false signature and date (J. Ochtervelt / 1676) at center
left. See Susan Donahue Kuretsky, The Paintings of Jacob Ochtervelt, 1634–1682: WithCatalog Raisonné (Montclair, 1979), 27–28, 91, no. 91.
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10. Charles Blanc, Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, vol. 11, École Hollandaise (Paris,1863), 8: “Les notions de l’antique, les sublimes conventions dont se compose l’idéal del’art, étaient trop au-dessus de son esprit et lui demeurent inconnues. . . . [Il] n’a pas
manqué quelque jolie femme de La Haye pour le modèle de sa Cléopâtre, et sa Cléopâtreelle-même pour le prétexte d’une belle robe de satin.”

ProvenanceThomas-François-Joseph, comte de Fraula (1647–1738), Brussels (his sale, Brussels, 21July 1738, no. 71 [for 105 florins]).
Possibly Christian Josi (1768–1828) (his sale, Christie’s, London, 26 February 1796, no. 85[to Thomas Chippendale Jr. for £2.15]).[1]Admiral Algernon Walker-Heneage-Vivian (1871–1952), Clyne Castle, Blackpill, Wales (hissale, Sotheby’s, London, 3 December 1952, no. 104, as Jacob Ochtervelt [to Dent]).
Leander McCormick-Goodhart, Alexandria, VA., by 1954; by descent until 1999 (sale,Christies, London, 9 July 1999, no. 166, as Jacob Ochtervelt [to Johnny van Haeften Ltd.,
London, and Otto Naumann, Ltd., New York]).
From whom acquired by present owner in 2004.

Provenance Notes

1. The present painting may also have been in one or both of the following sales, in both cases
as by “Mieris” and as the property of Thomas Chippendale Jr.: sale, Christie’s, London, 18
November 1797, lot 33 (for £1.11); and sale, Christie’s, London, 22 December 1798, lot 46(to Welch[?], for £1.16). Thomas Chippendale Jr., son of the famous furniture maker, wasalso an artist and occasional dealer in pictures.

References
Hofstede de Groot, Cornelis. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch
Painters of the Seventeenth Century Based on the Work of John Smith. Edited and translatedby Edward G. Hawke, 5:161, no. 38a. 8 vols. London, 1907–28. Originally published asBeschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen
Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts. 10 vols. Esslingen and Paris, 1907–28.
Kuretsky, Susan. The Paintings of Jacob Ochtervelt, 1634–1682: with Catalog Raisonné.
Montclair, 1979, 27–28, 91, no. 91, fig. 102. (as by Jacob Ochtervelt)© 2020 The Leiden Collection

Lucretia
Page 7 of 8Hecht, Peter, ed. De Hollandse fijnschilders: van Gerard Dou tot Adriaen van der Werff. Exh.
cat. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam, 1989, 176 no. 1.
Wieseman, Marjorie E. “Caspar Netscher and Late Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting.”
PhD diss. Columbia University, 1991, 321–22, no. 45.
Jansen, Guido. “Caspar Netscher.” In The Grove Dictionary of Art. Edited by Jane Turner, 22:916. 34 vols. New York, 2000.
Wieseman, Marjorie E. Caspar Netscher and Late Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting.
Doornspijk, 2002, 78–79, 84, 198–99, no. 47, fig. 47.
Wuestman, Gerdien. “C. H. van Meurs and his fijnschilder prints: a mysterious printmakerwith a forgotten oeuvre.” Simiolus 37, no. 2 (2013–14): 136, under no. 15.

Versions
Engraved

1. Cornelis Hubert van Meurs (active ca. 1675–78) after Caspar Netscher, Lucretia, engraving,
282 x 250 mm.

Versions and Copies

1. After Caspar Netscher, Lucretia, panel, 35.5 x 26.5 cm, Peter Hecht, Utrecht.
2. After Caspar Netscher, The History of Lucretia, panel, approx. 38.1 x 45.7 cm, sale, Lienau,Hamburg, 13–14 April 1790, no. 248 (for Sch. 8, to Johann Heinrich Schön).

3. Circle of Jacob Ochtervelt, Lucretia, panel, 30.5 x 25 cm, sale, Sotheby’s, London, 2011.
4. After Caspar Netscher, Lucretia, panel, 29.2 x 25.4 cm, sale, Duncan Macalester Loup et al.,Bosboom, The Hague, 20 August 1806, no. 193 (for 23.5 florins, to Pieter Joseph Thijs).

5. Variant copy by Toussaint Gelton, Lucretia, 1671, panel, Ham House, Surrey (National Trust).

Technical Summary
The support, a single plank of vertically grained, rectangular oak, has bevels on all four sides.[1]The panel is unthinned and uncradled and has machine tool marks and three red wax seals but
no import stamps or panel maker’s marks.
A red-brown ground has been thinly and evenly applied followed by a blue-gray layer. The painthas been thinly and smoothly applied with no use of impasto but with low brush markings along© 2020 The Leiden CollectionPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Lucretia
Page 8 of 8the swags of drapery, garment folds, and dagger contours.
No underdrawing is readily apparent in infrared images captured at 780–1000 nanometers, andno compositional changes are noted aside from slight shifts in the position of Lucretia’s proper
left pinky and the contour of her proper right thumb.
The painting is unsigned and undated. A false Jacob Ochtervelt signature and 1676 date wereremoved during a past conservation treatment.[2]The painting was cleaned and restored in 1999 prior to its acquisition in 2005. The painting
remains in a good state of preservation.

Technical Summary Endnotes

1. The characterization of the wood is based on visual examination only.
2. According to documents provided by Sara Smith, collections manager, The Leiden Collection.
The restorer is not named, and this painting is not included on the list of paintings restored for
the Gallery by Nancy Krieg in New York.

© 2020 The Leiden Collection