El rapto de Rebeca

A woman is seized and carried off on horseback in a swirl of colour and motion. Delacroix took this scene from Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and turned it into what the Metropolitan Museum calls one of his greatest paintings.

The story behind the painting

The Abduction of Rebecca is an oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, who is regarded as the leader of the French Romantic school. It depicts a scene from Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe in which the heroine Rebecca is abducted. Delacroix painted it at the height of French Romanticism and presented it at the Paris Salon of 1846. This was not his first encounter with Scott. According to his biography, Delacroix illustrated works by Shakespeare, Scott and Goethe, and as early as 1829 his Murder of the Bishop of Liège had also borrowed a medieval scene from Scott. The 1846 Rebecca, about 100 by 82 cm, belongs to his mature years, when such literary dramas still fired his imagination.

What to look for

Wikidata lists the painting's subjects as a battle, horsemanship, a man and a woman, and the drama is built from exactly these elements: a woman taken by force, a rider and horse, and the violence of conflict around them. The Wikipedia article on this painting gives little detail of the composition, so it helps to look with Delacroix's known priorities in mind. His biography explains that, unlike his rival Ingres, he drew on Rubens and the Venetian painters, emphasising colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Look for that energy here, in the expressive brushstrokes and in how colour, rather than crisp line, carries the action across the canvas.

Meaning and intent

Delacroix was drawn throughout his career to subjects of violence, passion and literary drama. His biography quotes Baudelaire: Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible. The Abduction of Rebecca fits that description. It is a scene of danger and helplessness taken from a novel of chivalry and set in the Middle Ages, a period that suited Romantic taste for history and strong emotion. Rather than offering a calm moral lesson, the painting places the viewer inside a moment of crisis, where the fate of the heroine is uncertain and everything is in motion.

Legacy

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the 1846 version, describes it as one of Delacroix's greatest paintings. The artist himself returned to the subject: in 1858 he created an almost identical work for the Paris Salon of 1859, and that second version is now in the Louvre. More broadly, his biography notes that Delacroix's expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the Symbolists. Seeing this canvas in New York, and its later twin in Paris, lets viewers follow how a Romantic master revisited a favourite drama more than a decade later.

¿Sabías que…?

Shown at the Paris Salon of 1846; now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The scene comes from Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe.
Delacroix painted an almost identical version in 1858 for the Salon of 1859; it is now in the Louvre.

Wikipedia · Wikipedia (Eugène Delacroix) · Wikidata