Two Women Washing In The Vicinity Of A Satyr, By Tischbein

Two Women Washing in the Vicinity of a Satyr, by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, after a Greek Vase from the Hamilton Collection.
Engraving, watercolour, contemporary gouache mats, 18th century Napolitan giltwood frame.
Italy.
1795.
64 x 52 cm.

A watercolor-enhanced engraving depicting two women washing their hair and bodies by drawing water from a basin (louterion), while a Satyr looks at them, in the nude and bearing Dionysian symbols. The subject is indeed identified as Two women washing in the presence of a Satyr by the distinguished archaeologist and philologist Salomon Reinach, member of the École française d’Athènes, curator of the Musée de Saint-Germain, and professor at the École du Louvre.

Sir William Hamilton, Scottish aristocrat born in 1730, dead in 1803, diplomat and collector, went in Naples in 1764, as ambassador of George III. He developed a keen interest in the funerary vases that were being unearthed in the necropolises of Campania. Within a few years, he assembled a collection of 730 funerary vases : this was the first Hamilton collection, disseminated throughout Europe by a collection of engravings directed by Pierre-François Hugues d'Hancarville, then sold to the British Museum in 1772.

Fifteen years later, Sir Hamilton set out to create a second collection of ancient vases. This resulted, from 1794 to 1803, in the publication of a four-volume series entitled Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases mostly of pure Greek Workmanship, illustrated and directed by the great German painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. The subject of Two women washing in the presence of a Satyr appears on the 29th plate of the fourth volume of the collection illustrated by Tischbein.

A portion of the second Hamilton collection sank in the wreck of the Colossus on December 10, 1798, off the coast of Cornwall. The remainder was purchased by Thomas Hope.

Sources

Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases, now in the Possession of Sir W. Hamilton, t. IV, Naples, 1795.
Salomon Reinach, Répertoire des vases peints grecs et étrusques, t. II, Paris, 1900.
Sebastien Schütze, « Etruskische, griechische und römische Antiken aus dem Kabinett von Sir William Hamilton » in The First Complete Collection of Antiquities from the Cabinet of Sir William Hamilton, Cologne, 2022.