Venus Healing Aeneas

Venus bends over the wounded Aeneas, tending the arrow wound in his thigh with her healing herbs while he reclines against a rock, the goddess of love revealed in her concern for her mortal son. In the Aeneid, when the arrow struck Aeneas in the final battle, his mother Venus stole down unseen and hastened his cure — a moment of tenderness in the epic that suited the small, polished cabinet pictures of the Neoclassical age. Merry Joseph Blondel, a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Regnault and winner of the Prix de Rome in 1803, painted this little canvas about 1820, early in the official career of decorative and history painting that would make him a leading artist of the Restoration. The picture was owned by the architect Hippolyte Lebas by 1867, was sold that year at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris merely as a mythological subject, and resurfaced at an Artcurial sale in 2010 under a mistaken title before the Art Institute identified it and acquired it in 2015 with funds provided by Pamela and Roger Hull through the Old Masters Society. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.