Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse

This dynamic sculptural group depicts a famous scene from Ovid. Pirithous, King of the Lapiths, invited the centaurs to celebrate his marriage to the beautiful Hippodamia. The drunken centaurs became out of control and the centaur Eurityon tried to abduct Hippodamia. King Pirithous, assisted by Theseus, later took revenge on the centaurs in a battle known as the Centauromachy, a scene depicted throughout art history, from the Parthenon to Piero di Cosimo and Peter Paul Rubens.

It has been justifiably suggested that this group owes much to Auguste Rodin's work. L'Enlèvement d'Hippodamie was first documented in 1871, when a terracotta version was exhibited in Brussels that year. The expert June Hargrove underlined that the centaur's body with bold musculature relates to Rodin's models for the Vase of the Titans, and that the screaming expression parallels Rodin's figure in The Calls to Arms of 1878. Carrier-Belleuse produced several versions of L'Enlèvement recorded in terracotta, marble and bronze.

While the present group is clearly inspired by famous rape groups of the Renaissance, such as Giambologna's Nessus and Dejaneira and his Rape of the Sabine, the powerful pose of the centaur's body is more contemporary and relates closely to Antoine-Louis Barye's Cheval surpris par un lion. Hippodamia is distinguished by ideal forms, typical of Carrier-Belleuse's mythological nudes.

RELATED LITERATURE

J. Hargrove, The Life and Work of Albert Carrier-Belleuse, New York and London, 1977, pp. 257-8, fig. 244; The Romantics to Rodin: French nineteenth-century sculpture from North American collections, P. Fusco and H.W. Janson (eds.), exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980, pp. 164-6, no. 50; J. Hargrove and G. Grandjean (eds.), Carrier-Belleuse, Le Maître de Rodin, exh. cat., Grand Palais de Compiègne, 2014, fig. 27