Jérôme Duquesnoy the Younger

Description & Technical information

Condition: Slightly weathered and with minor losses to the serpent's tail feathers. Top beak and tip of the lower beak replaced. Comment: Infant Hercules is extremely close in style and subject to a nine-feet-high (2.75-meter) marble statue of Ganymede and the eagle by Jérôme II Duquesnoy, now in Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster (D651), which was owned by Jan Lucas Faydherbe (1654-1704), who had been given it by his father, Lucas Faydherbe (1) following their collaboration on the high altar at the Cathedral of Sant Romnaut, Malines. The younger Faydherbe was installing Ganymede in the pleasure garden of his newly-built house on the Bruul, Malines in 1704, when he was fatally injured by the collapse of scaffolding. A drawing of Ganymede bears an inscriptionstating that Jérôme Duquesnoy invented the composition and this provides a firm basis for also attributing the present marble to him. (2) Duquesnoy is known to have cast mythological statues in lead for the gardens of the Brussels Palace, including a Hercules and an Eagle. (3) Furthermore, the posthumous inventory of the property of Jean-Henry Gobelinus, canon of Sainte-Gudule in Brussels and a member of Spanish court circles, mentions an Eagle and two Ganymedes by “de Quesnoy”. (4) In the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, there is a terracotta group of Hercules struggling with a serpent by Dusquesnoy. (5) The head of the serpent attacking Hercules is close to drawings of dragons by anonymous Netherlandish masters, also in the Van Herck collection (6), and Artus Quellinus incorporated