The Abduction of Rebecca by a Knight Templar

The Abduction of Rebecca by a Knight Templar

The Abduction of Rebecca by a Knight Templar

Artist:Attributed to Léon Cogniet (French, Paris 1794–1880 Paris)
Date:1828 or later
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:12 7/8 x 15 5/8 in. (32.7 x 39.7 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:The Whitney Collection, Promised Gift of Wheelock Whitney III, and Purchase, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. McVeigh, by exchange, 2003

The subject is drawn from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), in which the knight Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert, together with his Saracen slave and the Jewish heroine Rebecca, escape from the burning Torquilstone Castle. This painting is a reduced variant of one completed in 1828 and exhibited at the Salon of 1831 (Wallace Collection, London). The eclectic mix of exotic types, medieval themes, and dramatic action was a mainstay of Romanticism: a later rendition of this subject by Cogniet’s contemporary Eugène Delacroix is also in the Metropolitan’s collection (03.30).

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