Love Requests Venus to Return His Weapons to Him (1768): Art, History and Details

Love Requests Venus to Return His Weapons to Him (1768) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Louis-Marin Bonnet (French, 1736–1793); François Boucher (French, 1703–1770).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

For his aristocratic patrons, Boucher made numerous paintings of intriguing female nudes, thinly veiled as Roman goddesses lounging in luxury. Bonnet’s color chalk-manner prints of similar subjects offered middle-class buyers sumptuous yet affordable versions of Boucher’s wildly popular images. Here, a tiny cupid pleads with Venus for his quiver of arrows as she gazes teasingly at the viewer. Their feathered ends simultaneously conceal and draw attention to her nudity. With cupid’s arrows in her control, it is Venus—rather than cupid—who has the power to arouse feelings of love.

Object facts

• Title: Love Requests Venus to Return His Weapons to Him
• Date: 1768
• Creator attribution: Louis-Marin Bonnet (French, 1736–1793); François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France
• Type: Print
• Technique: chalk-manner etching and engraving printed in color
• Dimensions: Sheet: 30 x 39.8 cm (11 13/16 x 15 11/16 in.); Platemark: 27.3 x 36.7 cm (10 3/4 x 14 7/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 2006.182

Collection credit

James Parmelee Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Glaubinger, Jane. “Lasting Impressions.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 54, no. 5 (September/October 2014): 22-23.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.