The Hovingham Master

Anonymous sale, Munich, Neumeister Kunstauktionen, 27 June 2001, lot 586 (as follower of The Hovingham Master);

Anonymous sale, Vienna, Dorotheum, 21 March 2002, lot 346 (as The Hovingham Master);

Where acquired by David B. Lawall (d. 2025), Virginia;

By whom sold posthumously, Philadelphia, Freeman's, 4 November 2025, lot 29 (as The Hovingham Master);

Where acquired by the present owner.

The subject of this painting is taken from the story of Cupid and Psyche, as related by Apuleius in The Golden Ass. Pysche, whose beauty offended Venus, is shown consulting the oracle of Apollo to determine the reason for her inexplicable lack of suitors. The answer to her inquiry was that her husband was to be 'no mere mortal'; in fact it would be the god Eros himself.

'The Hovingham Master' is the name given by Anthony Blunt to the artist(s) to whom he linked a number of works which had traditionally been attributed to Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665).¹ The eponymous paintings are a pair of pendants at Hovingham Hall, Yorkshire. The present work relates in composition, with slight differences, to a painting attributed by Blunt to the Master, which is today in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick.²

¹ A. Blunt, 'Poussin Studies XII: The Hovingham Master', in The Burlington Magazine, vol. CII, no. 704, November 1961, pp. 454–61.

² Oil on canvas, 73.5 x 98 cm. https://photocollections.courtauld.ac.uk/sec-menu/search/detail/8eee2c1c-a264-012a-ae00-a3adc9465e13/media/676f7ca0-4f2b-60fe-9dff-818dc6ca3c45.