Jane Maude Juno, Venus & Cupid after Angelica Kauffmann

An original early 19th-century watercolour painting, Jane Maude, Juno, Venus & Cupid after Angelica Kauffmann.

An exceptionally fine an elegant watercolour in sepia after an 18th-century painting by Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807), which was reproduced as an etching by William Wynne Ryland. The image shows Juno, wife of Jupiter, borrowing the Cestus from Venus—a mythological episode from Homer’s Iliad. Angered by her husband's loyalty to Troy, Juno asks Venus to lend her a multi-coloured belt woven from threads of desire and passion, containing all the charms of seduction. She hopes that by wearing the belt she will rekindle the love of her unfaithful husband and make him abandon the Trojans.

The artist Jane Maude is likely to be the daughter of Thomas Maude Esq (1770–1831), of the Woodlands, Harrogate. Her sister, Cordelia Maude, lived in Jersey and died at a substantial house named Belvoir at the foot of Mont Millais, St Helier in 1852. Jane Maude married Edward Carus Wilson (1795–1860), whose brother Charles Carus Wilson (1797–1854) also had Jersey connections. Charles Carus Wilson was a London-based lawyer who was famously involved in a libel case between the Jersey and English authorities. He was imprisoned in Jersey for contempt of Court but applied to the English Court for a Writ of Habeas Corpus, which resulted in the landmark ruling that a Writ of Habeas Corpus extended to the Channel Islands. Wilson died at St Helier.