L’Amour captif (‘Cupid Captive’)
after Charles-Auguste Fraikin (1817 - 1893)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1851 - 1880
Materials
Marble
Measurements
775 mm (H)
Place of origin
Italy
Collection
Cragside, Northumberland
NT 1231014
Summary
Sculpture, marble; after Charles-Auguste Fraikin (1817-1893); Cupid Captive; c. 1851-80. A marble statuette after the Belgian sculptor Charles-Auguste Fraikin’s most successful work, L’Amour Captif or Cupid Captive, which was one of the successes at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Venus, the goddess of love, is shown running with her son Cupid balancing on her shoulder.
Full description
A reduction in marble of the full-size marble statue by Charles Fraikin entitled L’Amour Captif or Love Captive. The goddess Venus is depicted running forwards, holding by his right leg her son Cupid, seated precariously upon Venus’s right shoulder. She reaches up with her right hand to try to grasp his left hand. Venus has an elaborate coiffure with her hair at the back arranged into a large bun, and she is naked, except for a swag of drapery around her genitals, the other end of which is wrapped around a tree stump up which grows ivy, and a flower at the bottom. The tree trunk was designed as the essential structural support needed for the full-size sculpture. On an integral circular base, the top surface of which is textured, the sides plain. Probably made as a pair to a figure of similar size depicting a goatherd (NT 1231015). Charles Fraikin was born in Herenthals in Belgium and studied in Antwerp and then Brussels, becoming one of the most successful nineteenth-century Belgian sculptors. He worked in a sentimental classicizing style, his figures much influenced by the terracotta sculptures of the eighteenth-century French sculptor Clodion (Claude Michel, 1738-1814) and his followers. This is particularly apparent with small copies such as the Cragside sculpture, which are similar in size to some of Clodion’s most characteristic figures and groups, which were often made in terracotta. The Amour Captif is very close conceptually to Clodion’s terracotta model of a running male bacchant, a version of which is at Waddesdon Manor (Inv. 2456.1; Poulet and Scherf 1992, p. 333, fig. 176), whilst a terracotta figure of a young woman holding a child on her right shoulder, in much the same position as Cupid in Fraikin’s composition, has been recently attributed to one of Clodion’s followers, Jean Joseph Foucou (1739-1815). There is an example in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge , Mass. (Poulet and Scherf 1992, no. 84). There are further parallels with another sculpture also now thought to be by Foucou, his Bacchante carrying a baby faun, a marble version of which is in the Musée du Louvre in Paris (Poulet and Scherf 1992, no. 83). The Amour Captif was far and away Fraikin’s most successful work and it assured the young sculptor’s fame, when it was exhibited in Brussels in 1845. It was again exhibited at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 in a version in plaster, which was awarded a gold medal, and yet again in the 1853 Industrial exhibition in Dublin. There are marble versions in the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels and the Hermitage, St Petersburg. As a sculpture it is a classic example of the sort of female figure sculptures produced in some numbers by Fraikin. Other examples, entitled the Fairy of the Woods and Sleeping Venus, were among the works exhibited by Fraikin at the 1865 International Exhbition in Dublin and memorably described by the reviewer in the Illustrated London News (19 August 1865) as ‘this celebrated sculptor’s luxurious and rather meretricious female representations.’ Numerous versions of the Amour captif were made in the nineteenth century, some of them full-size (e.g. Sotheby’s London, European Art: Paintings & Sculpture, 18 June 2020, lot 20) but many on a smaller scale, both in marble and in bronze. A large number of copies were made in the marble workshops in Carrara in Italy, one example the version signed by Pietro Franchi (1817-78) sold at Bonham’s in 2009 (Sculpture and Early Works of Art, 22 April 2009, lot 124). It would seem most likely that the copy at Cragside was likewise made in Italy. A Parian-ware figure of l'Amour Captif by an unknown manufacturer (Atterbury, The Parian Phenomenon, fig. 851) is one of numerous copies in other materials of this once famous sculpture, that were made in Britain and elsewhere following its success at the 1851 Great Exhibition. Jeremy Warren March 2022
Provenance
Armstrong collection. Transferred by the Treasury to The National Trust in 1977 via the National Land Fund, aided by 3rd Baron Armstrong of Bamburgh and Cragside (1919 - 1987).
Makers and roles
after Charles-Auguste Fraikin (1817 - 1893), sculptor
References
Atterbury, 1989: Paul Atterbury &c, The Parian Phenomenon. A Survey of Victorian Parian Porcelain statuary and busts, Somerset, 1989, p. 250, fig. 851. Poulet and Scherf 1992: Anne Poulet and Guillaume Scherf, Clodion 1738-1814, exh. cat., Musée du Louvre, Paris 1992, p. 333, fig. 176; pp. 379-86, cat. nos. 83-84.