Jupiter and Mnemosyne

Jacob de Wit · 1733

Medium

Pen and brown and black ink and brush and brown and gray wash, with watercolor, heightened with white gouache, over traces of graphite on ivory laid paper

Original size

44.9 × 31 cm (17 11/16 × 12 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Rococo

Jacob de Wit's 1733 drawing of Jupiter and Mnemosyne is a tender, luminous study — gods rendered in warm washes of brown and grey, soft yet purposeful, with white gouache lending an almost sculptural glow to the figures. De Wit was the foremost decorative painter in eighteenth-century Amsterdam, celebrated for ceiling commissions in the city's grandest canal houses and churches. Trained in Antwerp under the influence of Rubens, he brought a Flemish richness to Dutch interiors at a time when restrained classicism dominated the north. This work on ivory laid paper shows the intimacy of his preparatory process: layered washes building form and shadow, the white heightening catching light as it would on plaster or canvas. The subject draws on one of mythology's more poetic unions. Jupiter spent nine consecutive nights with Mnemosyne, the Titaness of memory, and from that pairing came the nine Muses — the divine source of all art, poetry, and music. De Wit, who spent his career adorning the spaces where Amsterdam's cultured elite lived and entertained, would have understood the resonance of that story. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates De Wit's delicate, paper-based composition into the weight and warmth of oil on canvas, preserving every gradation of tone while giving the scene a presence suited to a wall.