Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus
"The Toilet of Venus" a Beautiful Nude Painting by a Spanish Master
Why was "Venus at her Mirror" badly damaged by a suffragette, one of the so-called "wild women," during an attack at the National Gallery in London on March 10, 1914?
“The Rokeby Venus,” also known as “Venus at her Mirror” and “The Toilet of Venus,” painted around 1643, is the only surviving example of a female nude by 17th-century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). The painting depicts a nude woman lying on a silky gray spread with her back to the viewer, her face showing in a mirror held by Cupid, the scene off-set by a rich red drape and warm brown wall in the background.
The subject matter of Venus, the goddess of sensual love, was rare in 17th-century Spain because it did not meet the approval of the Church. The Catholic Church was a huge and influential patron of the arts and many paintings of nudes did not survive the Inquisition.
According to the Hastings Press, Canadian Mary Raleigh Richardson (1889-1961) was a militant suffragist who carried out many terrorist acts including smashing windows, setting a fire, and bombing a railway station. In 1914 she walked into the National Gallery, smashed a protective glass barrier, and hacked at Velázquez’s “Venus” canvas with a meat cleaver after standing in front of it for several minutes, seemingly in contemplation and appreciation. Her attack left several slashes on the painting. All of them were subsequently successfully repaired.
The mutilation of the “Venus” was part of a campaign of 1914 attacks on paintings in the National Gallery, Royal Academy Exhibition, and the National Portrait Gallery in the name of radical suffrage. George Romney's “Master Thornhill,” in the Birmingham Art Gallery, was slashed, for example, and a portrait of Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle, painted by Sir John Millais, was mutilated, among others. But the attack on Venus by Mary Richardson was the most famous.
For a brief time after these attacks, all women were denied admission to the National Gallery. Richardson’s destructive act may have served to prove what to her seemed a valid point: to show the social power the gallery had as a masculine and overbearing institution.
According to Bertelsen and Christensen (editors of the art journal ARK), Mary Richardson, who was a self-proclaimed art student, explained her attempt to destroy the painting in a 1952 interview, 40 years later, by stating that she "didn't like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long.”
The painting is known as “The Rokeby Venus” because it was in a collection at Rokeby Hall in Yorkshire before being acquired by the National Gallery. It is currently on loan to the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid through February 2008.
Sources:
- Bailey, Colin J. The Art Quiz Book: 2000+ Questions on Painters and Paintings. Station Press: Scotland, 1995.
- Lars Kiel Bertelsen and Klaus Christensen. “Political Vandalism, Art and Gender.” KVINFO. November 28, 2004.
