Satyr and Bacchante
James Pradier (1790-1852) · 1834
A goat-legged satyr, grinning, pulls a naked bacchante across his knee. She arches backwards, vine leaves and grapes in her hair, her body abandoned to the moment, one arm trailing to the ground while he grips her and lifts her drapery aside. The marble is as polished and precise as anything in the neoclassical tradition, but the subject and the frankness of the bodies belong to a new, Romantic sensuality. Walk round the group: it has been composed to be seen from every side, and the play of limbs changes at each step.
When Pradier showed the group at the Salon of 1834 it caused a scandal for its eroticism, and tradition has it that the model for the bacchante was Juliette Drouet, the sculptor's mistress and later the companion of Victor Hugo. The Russian magnate Anatole Demidoff bought it for his palace of San Donato near Florence; it later belonged to Sir Richard Wallace at Bagatelle and then to a series of French collectors. When it was about to leave France in 1980 the state blocked the export and the Louvre acquired it with the help of the Friends of the Louvre.
Did You Know? The state stopped this marble at the border in 1980 to keep it in France, a century and a half after Paris had called it indecent.
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