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The Museum's website (
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"Reclining Naiad
Artist: Antonio Canova (Italian, Possagno 1757–1822 Venice) , and his studio
Patron: Commissioned by John Bligh, 4th Earl of Darnley
Date: 1819–24
Culture: Italian, Rome
Medium: White marble on grey marble
Dimensions: Overall (wt confirmed): 35 x 75 x 32 1/2 in., 2558 lb. (88.9 x 190.5 x 82.6 cm, 1160.3012 kg)
Classification: Sculpture
Credit Line: Purchase, Mrs. Joseph A. Neff Gift, in memory of Joseph A. Neff, 1970
Accession Number: 1970.1
On view in Gallery 548
This is a variant of the Reclining Venus with Cupid, now in Buckingham Palace, which was made for Lord Cawdor in 1814 and ceded by him to the Prince Regent. 1970.1, commissioned by the fourth earl of Darnley, was completed by Canova's assistents after his death and delivered to the earl at Cobham Hall in Kent in 1824. The original plaster model for the Naiad, completed in 1817, is in the Gipsoteca di Possagno. Compositional prototypes include Canova's Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix and an ancient Hermaphrodite, both in the Borghese Gallery, Rome. Numerous slight indentations throughout the marble may be visible remains of the pointing system."
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
"In Greek mythology, the Naiads (Ancient Greek: ?a??de?) were a type of water nymph (female spirit) who presided over fountains, wells, springs, streams, brooks and other bodies of fresh water.
They are distinct from river gods, who embodied rivers, and the very ancient spirits that inhabited the still waters of marshes, ponds and lagoon-lakes, such as pre-Mycenaean Lerna in the Argolis.
Naiads were associated with fresh water, as the Oceanids were with saltwater and the Nereids specifically with the Mediterranean, but because the Greeks thought of the world's waters as all one system, which percolated in from the sea in deep cavernous spaces within the earth, there was some overlap. Arethusa, the nymph of a spring, could make her way through subterranean flows from the Peloponnesus, to surface on the island of Sicily."