Jupiter, Venus and Mercury

A lost mythological history painting known only from an auction record. It was sold in Delft on 24 March 1716 from the estate of the patrician Willem van Berckel, listed as “Jupiter, Venus en Mercurius door J. ver Meer.” Nothing further is recorded of it, and it has remained untraced ever since.

An early history painting

A mythological subject of this kind would most likely belong to the start of Vermeer’s career, when his ambitions lay with history painting rather than the domestic interiors for which he is now known. It would stand alongside the surviving Diana and Her Companions and the lost Visit to the Tomb, the small group of religious and mythological works that mark his earliest output.

A doubtful title

John Michael Montias questioned the title, observing that Jupiter, Venus and Mercury do not appear together in any standard myth, and suspected the auctioneer had misnamed a scene of Virtue or Psyche, since such pictures usually placed Virtue or Psyche at their center rather than a Venus. Michiel Plomp later connected the lost picture to a drawing by Leonaert Bramer after a composition by Jacob Jordaens, showing Venus complaining to Jupiter in Mercury’s presence, an episode from the Psyche legend recorded in a Delft album of 1652–53 that Vermeer could plausibly have known. Some popular accounts date the sale to 1761, but the scholarship places it in 1716.