Augustin Terwesten - The Three Graces

The subject of the “Three Graces” is very widespread in Western art. Derived from Roman mythology, it began to appear in both painting and sculpture during the Humanist and Renaissance periods, when artists drew inspiration from the models of classical antiquity. Among the most famous examples is Sandro Botticelli’s renowned interpretation in his “Primavera.” The subject is present in all artistic movements that drew inspiration from classicism: we may recall, for example, the Neoclassical masterpiece by the sculptor Antonio Canova on the same theme. The Three Graces are always depicted as three young nude women holding hands or embracing. Roman religion adapted the myth of the Three Graces from the
Greek myth of the Charites, who according to Hesiod were Aglaia, Splendor, Euphrosyne, Joy, and Thalia, Prosperity. They are therefore an auspicious representation of the fullness of life and the happiness that every human being should embody.

From the point of view of style and compositional conception, the work presents several very interesting aspects. It is a painting composed according to a strongly classicist conception reworked in the seventeenth century. The strong classicist component is traceable, as we have seen, first of all in the subject, derived from Greco-Roman mythology, but it can also be seen in the composition. Indeed, the work is structured according to a perfect central and symmetrical vision, in which the arrangement of the Three Graces (according to the traditional scheme in which two are facing the public, while the central one is turned away) is achieved through a harmonious correspondence of gestures. Furthermore, even from a formal point of view, there is an ostentatious exaltation of plastic values in the construction of sculptural volumes, noticeable in the compact anatomies and the description of the complicated draperies. In fact, in this sense we notice a tendency of the artist towards a clarity of volumes and the avoidance of overly accentuated effects of painterliness or atmospheric effects that corrode the forms. This results, in some way, in a counter-trend with the period in which the work was painted, given the accentuated painterliness typical of Baroque art and other seventeenth-century movements. We notice, in fact, in this painter a strong residue of a Mannerist conception of painting, noticeable especially in a certain unnatural elongation of the forms. However, there is no doubt that the work is seventeenth-century given the aura of magniloquent austerity that shapes its entire conception. Very indicative, in this sense, is the prevalence of a dark chromaticism and the decontextualized black background from which the figures emerge. From a formal point of view, the artist shows that he possesses a very great painting technique that we can see in the softness of the touch with which the statuesque anatomies, brought to life by an intense play of light and shadow, are outlined.

The work was attributed to Augustin Terwesten, a Dutch painter born in The Hague in 1649 and who died in Berlin in 1711. He was a painter at the court of the Prince-Elector of Brandenburg Frederick William. Known precisely for his subjects inspired by classical history and mythology, his training also took place in Italy, where he stayed in Rome from 1675 to 1677 and in Florence and Venice in 1678. In these cities, Terwesten had the opportunity to study and copy the great masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance masters, so that in his Flemish background a strong classicist component was grafted on, both from an iconographic and formal point of view. Precisely the union of the Flemish component with the classicist one came to create that particular stylistic manner that we can also see in our work, for which the artist seeks the plastic exaltation of sculptural volumes and forms in a compact application that shuns overly accentuated painterliness in a sort of seventeenth-century re-enactment of Mannerism.

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