Venus with amor the honey thief

This early version of Venus with Cupid the Honey Thief, dating to around 1513 and now at the Kröller-Müller Museum, shows Cranach at the very beginning of his development of what would become his most commercially successful mythological subject. The composition was not yet standardized: the early versions explored different configurations of Venus, Cupid, the apple tree, and the bees before the formula settled into the more schematic arrangements of the 1520s and 1530s. The Kröller-Müller Museum, which holds both this early Venus with Honey Thief and the 1513 Venus and Cupid, Johanness the Steadfast portrait, and the Red and White Carnations, is one of the institutions most richly represented in Cranach's early secular production. Helene Kröller-Müller's collecting, guided by H.P. Bremmer, emphasized the Northern Renaissance alongside her purchases of Van Gogh, and the result is a collection where the dialogue between Cranach and Van Gogh — both artists working obsessively with the same subjects — can be directly experienced. The Theocritean source — the bee-stung Cupid complaining to Venus — was familiar enough to humanist patrons that Cranach could invoke it with light treatment.

More naturalistic proportions than Cranach's later, more stylized versions of the subject suggest this early treatment was closer to life study. The landscape background is more developed than in later versions, which increasingly reduced the setting to a dark backdrop.