Johannes Antonius van der Ven (1799–1866)

Sculptor baptised on 17 August 1799 in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, North Brabant, Netherlands. In 1812 he enrolled in the newly established ‘s-Hertogenbosch Art Academy; here, in 1816, he won the prize for drawing from casts of antique statues. In 1817 he transferred to the Antwerp Academy under Jan Frans van Geel and in 1820 to the Brussels Academy under Gilles-Lambert Godecharle where, in 1822, he was awarded a first medal for drawing from life and relocated to Paris to study with François Joseph Bosio. He returned to Antwerp in 1827 and in 1830 won the Prix de Rome but, with Antwerp at the centre of the violence surrounding the formation of the Kingdom of Belgium, his relocation to Rome was delayed until 1834. In Rome, Ven’s countryman, Matthieu Kessels, introduced him to neoclassical sculptors in the circle of Bertel Thorvaldsen and Antonio Canova whose work was to exert a great influence on him. In 1837 Ven began a clay model for what was to become his best-known work, Eve Tempted by the Serpent. After casting it in plaster, he was commissioned by the Russian Countess, Olga Orlova-Davydova, to make a replica in marble, which he completed in 1841 (and which is now in the Fabergé Museum, St Petersburg). From this he made a second plaster (dated ‘Roma 1841’) which he exhibited in Antwerp in 1841 and The Hague in 1842, and which caught the eye of King William II of the Netherlands, who also commissioned a marble copy while, at about the same time, appointing Ven a Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion. Following the king’s death in 1849, his Eve was sold, and it made its next appearance in the Great Exhibition of 1851, contributed by its new owner, Count Egloffstein. Egloffstein’s copy is presumably the marble which at an unknown date was acquired by the Glynn-Morris family of Basil Grange, Sandfield Park, Liverpool, and which in 1952 was presented by Dr Mansel Glynn-Morris to Bootle Borough Council. It now graces the entrance hall of Bootle Town Hall. As for the second plaster, Ven sold that to a Mr. F.J.E. van Zinnicq Bergmann, whose heirs donated it in 1879 to what is now the Noordbrabants Museum in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. (After damage and subsequent repairs, in 1987 the plaster was cast in bronze.)  Ven returned from Rome in 1849, settling permanently in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, where, in 1854–88, he executed a series of 14 statues, representing Christ and the Apostles, for the choir of Sint-Janskathedraal (St John’s Cathedral). From 1858 he was director of ‘s-Hertogenbosch’s Academy. He died suddenly – according to one account, of heart disease – on 12 July 1866, while installing a Pietà in the church of St Anthony Abbot in De Mortel near Gemert. Ven and his wife (who outlived him) are buried in the cemetery on Elisabethstraat in Vught.

Bibliography: Art Journal, 1855, p. 156 (and engraving on following page); Bossche Encyclopedie: (i) ‘Johannes van der Ven’, (ii) ‘De bekoring van Eva’;  E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, p. 47; New Dutch Biographical Dictionary. Part 4 (1918): ‘Ven, Johannes Antonius van der’; Royal Collection Trust: ‘The Great Exhibition, 1851: Eve by Van Der Ven’; H. Weekes, The Prize Treatise on the Fine Arts Section of the Great Exhibition of 1851 …, London, 1852, p. 81.

Terry Cavanagh, December 2025