E. Prosper d'Epinay

Prosper d’Épinay was born to aristocratic parents who emigrated from France to the island of Mauritius, then governed by England.  His strong connection to England is reflected in his consistent participation at the Royal Academy from 1865 to 1881.   Although trained and educated in France, Prosper d’Épinay also maintained a studio in Rome (1864 -1912), where he became a close friend of Mario Fortuny and Henri Regnault, and helped the young Falguière. His career as a society portraitist was fostered by the Princess of Wales and Czar Alexander III.  His female nude La Ceinture Dorée attracted considerable attention when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1874; several versions in marble are known, and it was also cast in bronze and porcelain. 

The distinctive treatment of Hannibal’s hair in Hannibal struggling the Eagle of  1867 (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1869) possibly alludes to Prosper d’Épinay’s interest in ethnological types.  The subject comes from Gustave Flaubert’s exotic novel Salammbô, published five years before in 1862.  An allegory of the battle between Carthage and Rome, the episode in Flaubert’s novel was intended to foreshadow Hannibal’s greatness.  The mysterious boy was described  as being “intrepid and afraid of nothing.  …He invents traps for wild beasts.… He surprised an eagle; he dragged it, and the blood of the bird and the boy splattered in the air in large drops, like rose-petals blowing in the wind.  The beast, furious, enveloped him with the beating of its wings; the boy grasped it against his chest, and as much as the bird agonized, his laughs redoubled, as loud and brilliant as the shocks from swords clashing together.”

Saint-Beuve had criticized Flaubert for a variety of historical errors in the novel, and Flaubert retorted in December 1862: “Why do you believe that I made something ‘fantastic’ of the youth of Hannibal? Because he killed an eagle?  A major wonder in a land where eagles abound! If the scene had been placed in Gaul, I could have referred to a stork, a wolf, or a fox. But, being French as you are, you are accustomed, in spite of yourself, to consider the eagle a noble bird, and even more as as a symbol, instead of a living being. Yet, eagles exist.”   

A marble example of Hannibal belonged to the Duke of Buccleuch; terracottas remain with the artist’s descendants; and plaster and terracotta sketches also were known.  There are three, perhaps four, examples in bronze; one belonged to the Marquis de Foz and another to the Duke of Westminster.