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44
HERMES AND THE INFANT BACCHUS 1927
CHARLES
HASLEWOOD SHANNON, R.A.
1863 - 1937
Oil
on canvas, 101.6 x 101.6 (40 x 40) Signed, CHARLES SHANNON
(lower left, in red)
Provenance:
Executors of C.H.Shannon, sale Sotheby's, 29 March 1939 (92);
Cecil French.
Exhibited:
Royal Academy, 1927 (153); Barbizon House, Paintings and
Drawings by Charles Shannon, 1928 (12).
Hermes,
holding his caduceus in his left hand flies low above a stormy
sea. Blue wings emerge from either side of his dark hair.
A plump infant Bacchus, with grape entwined hair, sits astride
his neck, holding on to a wing.
The
subject is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 3,
310-12, which describes the birth of Bacchus from the thigh
of his father Jupiter. Following his birth Hermes took the
infant to the Nymphs of Mount Nysa to take care of him.
A
drawing for this composition (whereabouts unknown) was also
shown at the Barbizon House exhibition of 1928 (37) and may
be identical with a chalk study shown at the R.A. in 1930
(1208).
Shannon
painted three versions of the subject of which this is the
last and most frenetic. The others are both circular in composition.
The earliest is Hermes and the Infant Bacchus, 1902-6,
(107.3 diameter) in the Tate Gallery, London. A smaller version
(80.5 diameter), painted in 1906, is now in the Usher Gallery,
Lincoln. The subject of the childhood of Bacchus was a recurring
one in his work which first appeared in 1897 when he exhibited
a lithograph of An Infant Bacchus (25.6 diameter) at the N.E.A.C.
(25). The composition of the Tate and Usher paintings closely
follows the lithograph but in reverse.
A
further Childhood of Bacchus (119.4 x 106.7), in a
private collection, was shown at the Royal Academy in 1920
(185) and was also exhibited at the Barbizon House exhibition
(3), lent by Lady Davis. This was sold at the Sir Edmund Davis
Sale, Christie's, 15 May 1942 (145). Also known as The
Education of Bacchus it shows Hermes delivering Bacchus
to the Nymphs of Mount Nysa.
Shannon
first exhibited the Tate version in the exhibition Paintings
and Bronzes by Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts at
the Carfax Gallery in July 1907 (14) in which Ricketts showed
The Triumph of Bacchus (6). They were almost certainly
drawn to the subject through their mutual interest in Titian
whose Bacchus and Ariadne in the National Gallery was
a paint-ing they greatly admired. Ricketts devoted a whole
chapter to the painting in his monograph Titian, 1910,
and believed it to be "the greatest picture in the world"
(Studio 48, 1910, p.259).
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