Anonymous sale, Monaco, Sotheby's, 18 June 1992, lot 71 (as Jean-Frédéric Schall);
There purchased by the present collectors. 

J-P. Marandel in Eye for the Sensual, exhibition catalogue, Stuttgart 2010, pp. 140-1, cat. no. 35, reproduced in color.

This refined and classically composed Sleeping Venus reflects a taste developed in Paris by Schall and others, such as Jacques Antoine Vallin, during the reign of Louis XV. It likely served as a part of a larger decorative scheme for one of the numerous opulent and stately Parisian homes built towards the end of the Eighteenth century.¹ Many of these homes were located in the neighborhood of the Chaussée d'Antin, where numerous cultural luminaries commissioned homes from the leading architects of the day, such as as Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), François-Joseph Bélanger (1744-1818), and Alexandre Théodore Brongniart (1739-1813). Though none of these homes survived the re-zoning and reconstruction projects which took place in Paris towards the end of the 19^th century, some of their elegant decorations do survive, and provide a sense of the refined Rococo taste of their day.

Such a specifically decorative and compositionally complex painting is atypical for Schall, who rose to fame as one of the preeminent genre and pastoral painters of his day. His particular specialty was of single female dancers and young women in softly colored idyllic settings. However, the present type of work was not unheard of for Schall, as it may be compared to four others (now lost), of slightly larger dimensions and similar mythological subject matter which once formed part of the collection of Prince Anatole Demidoff (1813-1870), at his home in San Donato, Florence.² 

1. A. Girodie, Un peintre de fêtes galantes. Jean Fréderic Schall [Strasbourg 1752-Paris 1825], Strasbourg 1927.
2. Ibid., p. 25.