Venus Clipping Cupid's Wings

The first owner on record is Arthur Stevens, a Belgian dealer and the brother of the painter Alfred Stevens, who had this canvas in Brussels in 1875, the year Corot died. For about 20 years it stayed in Belgian hands, passing to the painter Alfred de Knyff and then to a Brussels collector, Émile Dekens. In 1897 the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel sold it to Henry Osborne Havemeyer, the New York sugar refiner, who was buying on behalf of a friend. Oliver Hazard Payne had made his fortune as treasurer of Standard Oil and never married, and Havemeyer advised him on pictures. When Payne died in 1917 the painting went to his nephew, Harry Payne Bingham, and it stayed in the family until 1987, when it was given to the museum anonymously in Bingham's memory. Venus kneels in a meadow, bare to the waist, holding out a piece of fruit to Cupid. While he looks at it, her other hand reaches behind him with a small pair of scissors, toward his wings. The museum dates the canvas to about 1870 to 1873.