The Abduction of Hippodamia (L'Enlèvement d'Hippodamie)

model 1877/1879, cast after 1877

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse

Sculptor, French, 1824 - 1887

Auguste Rodin

Sculptor, French, 1840 - 1917

A centaur, a creature with a man’s torso and horse’s body, wraps both arms around a nearly nude woman who falls backward in this bronze, freestanding sculpture. In this photograph, the centaur faces our right with its front feet rearing up. His muscular torso leans to our left, and his mouth is wide open and brows deeply furrowed. A wreath of flowers is tied with a bow around his head, and he looks to the right. In his arms, the woman’s legs and arms fall back as she arcs away from him. One knee and one elbow are bent, and drapery covers only her groin. Her hair cascades onto the centaur’s rump, and her eyes and mouth are wide open. The centaur’s tail is lifted, and one back foot is planted forward, under the bulk of his body. The other leg is bent so the top of that hoof rests on a swath of fabric that falls down the far side of the pair. Water pours from an overturned urn onto a textured ground between the centaur’s feet. The cast base has molding and a plaque on the front reading, “L’ENLEVEMENT.” The bronze is shiny brown in some areas with a pine-green patina in other areas.

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Carrier-Belleuse portrays a wrenching struggle between woman and beast in this abduction scene from Greek myth. The inebriated centaur, a guest at the wedding feast of Hippodamia and the Lapith king, grabs the young bride, pinning her to his side and setting off a battle between the human Lapiths and the wild centaurs. Hippodamia is rescued, but the episode starts a greater war between the two factions. In the end, the Lapiths triumph and the centaurs retreat to the mountains. With its classical references (the wedding garlands worn by both figures and the overturned wine jar), nineteenth-century viewers would have recognized the story—a motif for the moral struggle between rationality and bestiality, between civilized behavior and primitive instincts.

With his Abduction, Carrier-Belleuse introduced an extraordinary neo-baroque dynamism to a classical subject. He captured the figures at the moment of highest tension: the centaur seems to explode as he turns and thrusts both up and back, while Hippodamia twists and stretches, forcing energy out from the center.

Scholars speculate that while the sensuous, long-limbed Hippodamia is characteristic of Carrier-Belleuse's female nudes, the overall expressive intensity of the sculpture—particularly the centaur's bulky musculature and bellowing mouth—reflect the energetic modeling of Auguste Rodin. Carrier-Belleuse employed Rodin in his studio in the 1870s; it is very possible that the younger artist contributed to this work.

More information on this object can be found in the Gallery publication European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century, which is available as a free PDF https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/research/publications/pdfs/european-sculpture-19th-century.pdf

On View

West Building Ground Floor, Gallery G3


Artwork overview

  • Medium

    bronze

  • Credit Line

    William Nelson Cromwell Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 64.8 x 55.6 x 29.2 cm (25 1/2 x 21 7/8 x 11 1/2 in.)

  • Accession

    1977.58.1


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Private collection, Paris; purchased c. 1976 by (Michael Hall Fine Arts, New York); purchased 31 October 1977 by NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1980

  • The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from North American Collections, Los Angeles County Mus. of Art; Minneapolis Inst. of Arts; Detroit Inst. of Arts; Indianapolis Mus. of Art; Mus. of Fine Arts, Boston, 1980-1981, no. 50.

Bibliography

1980

  • Hargrove, June. "Abduction of Hippodamie (L'Enlèvement)." In The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from North American Collections. Peter Fusco and H.W. Janson, eds. Exh. cat. 5 venues. New York, 1980: 164-166, repro.

1994

  • Sculpture: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1994: 43, repro.

2000

  • Butler, Ruth, and Suzanne Glover Lindsay, with Alison Luchs, Douglas Lewis, Cynthia J. Mills, and Jeffrey Weidman. European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 2000: 81-86, color repro.

Inscriptions

incised in model beside urn on self-base and enhanced after casting: CaRRIER-BEllEUSE (mixed block and cursive characters); embossed in the model, on title plaque on self-base: L'ENLEVEMENT; foundry mark cold-stamped on self-base beneath rear left hoof: BRONZE GARANTI AU TITRE

Markings

FM: BRONZE GARANTI AU TITRE / n

Wikidata ID

Q63854297


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