Summary

Sculpture, bronze; The Abduction of a Sabine Woman; attributed to Adriaen de Vries (c. 1556-1626); Augsburg, c. 1595-1600. The bronze depicts an episode from early Roman history when Romulus, one of the founders of Rome, became concerned that the small Roman population needed to be boosted if the new state were to survive. A rival tribe the Sabines were therefore invited for a feast at which, at a prearranged moment, the Roman men carried off all the unmarried Sabine women. This powerful composition, with a Roman horseman abducting one of the Sabine women, has been recently identified as a rare work by the Dutch sculptor Adriaen de Vries, who in the early 1580s worked in Florence for the leading sculptor of the day, Giovanni Bologna (Giambologna, 1529-1608). Giambologna's late mannerist style had a profound and lasting influence on de Vries throughout his life and is reflected to varying degrees in many of the sculptor's subsequent works. The Abduction of a Sabine Woman was probably made in the later 1590s, when Adriaen de Vries was working in the southern German city of Augsburg. The group has, probably since at least the early eighteenth century, been paired with the group of the Abduction of Deianira by the centaur Nessus, cast by Antonio Susini from a model by Giambologna (NT 652912). Modern casts of the two bronzes were made in Paris in around 1720. Examples of these copies appear in French eighteenth-century auctions, with some pairs surviving in museum collections today.

Full description

A bronze sculpture depicting a young woman being carried away by a man who is mounted on horseback, with the horse rearing. The naked figures are separated by a piece of drapery that runs underneath the man and then between the figures. The muscular man has hoisted the woman onto the back of his horse and grasps her by her stomach, gripping the woman’s shoulder with his left hand. Frantic with fear, she twists her body and gesticulates with her right hand, whilst with her other hand she attempts to detach her abductor’s hand from her shoulder. The horse has a bridle and originally also had separately-cast reins, which are now lost. The very ends of the reins are though cast with the main bronze and may be seen under the rider’s left hand. The group is mounted on a separately cast oval bronze base, fastened at the hooves. A later hole has been made in the centre of the base, through which the group is now fixed with a modern screw to an ebonised wooden base with gilt-bronze mounts, in the style of André-Charles Boulle (1642-1732). The sculpture is today paired with a bronze depicting another abduction, this time of Deianira, wife of Hercules, by the centaur Nessus (NT 652912). The model for that bronze is by Giambologna, but it was almost certainly cast and finished by Antonio Susini. The modelling of the sculpture of the Abduction of a Sabine Woman is quite varied, with some rather rough parts contrasting with areas of superb modelling, for example the man’s hands, or the veins in the horse’s hind flanks, as it rears and takes the strain of the two figures that it is bearing. There is an especially fine contrast between the soft smooth flesh of the woman and the rougher skin of the man, whose hands display prominent veins. The sculpture seems essentially to have been cast in one piece. The forelegs of the horse have been broken and repaired but do not seem to have been originally separately cast. The woman’s right leg is broken at the ankle and has been repaired with a rivet plug. There are various casting flaws that have been left unrepaired: in the tail, on the right side of the woman’s head, above her ear; on the right side of the horse’s head, below the ear. The subject of the bronze group, the abduction of a Sabine woman by a young Roman man, refers to one of the foundation legends of the early history of Rome. Romulus, who had established the city of Rome with his brother Remus, came to realize that if the young settlement were to survive, radical steps would have to be taken to boost its population. He therefore organized a festival to which he invited neighbouring peoples, including the Sabines, an ancient Italic tribe living in the mountains to the east of the river Tiber. In the midst of the festivities and at a prearranged signal, the young Roman men seized the unmarried Sabine women and carried them off. Romulus subsequently appeared among the grief-stricken women, exhorting them to help in the building of the Roman state. The story was recounted by Livy in his History of Rome (I.9) and by Plutarch in his life of Romulus (14-15), both authors insisting that no married women were taken, except one in error, and that all those women who were taken were treated courteously and well. The subject became popular in Western art during the Renaissance and even more so during the Baroque period, since it offered artists the chance to depict grand banquet scenes, rendered even more exciting by the confused struggle between the muscular Roman men and the nubile Sabine women. The most celebrated depiction of the scene in sculpture is the monumental three figure group in marble by Giovanni Bologna (Giambologna, 1529-1608), unveiled in January 1583 and still to this day on view in the Loggia dei Lanzi, opposite the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Knowledge of this composition was from an early date disseminated through prints but also small bronze reductions (Avery 1987, pp. 109-14; Wengraf 2014, no. 9; Warren 2016, no. 112). As its completion and unveiling drew nearer, the subject of Giambologna’s marble group seems to have been by no means clear among Giambologna's fellow citizens in Florence. The sculptor was notoriously indifferent to subject matter, writing in the context of a slightly earlier two figure bronze group of a man carrying off a woman (Avery and Radcliffe 1978, nos. 56-57; Avery 1987, pp. 69-70) that ‘the two figures can be read as the Abduction of Helen, or perhaps Proserpine, or one of the Sabine women. I chose it to give scope to learning and the study of art.’ It was only once the great marble sculpture had been installed that it became established, almost as if through popular consensus, that the monument did indeed depict the Romans’ abduction of the Sabine women. The meaning must in fact have been made clear with the insertion into the marble statue’s plinth of a large bronze narrative relief. Unlike the marble group, which essentially deals in abstract terms with the struggle between a man and a woman, the relief gives a vivid impression of the confused mêlée in the banqueting hall. It includes two men on horseback carrying off women. The right-hand group of horse, rider and struggling woman is especially relevant for the Sudbury group, since the man is depicted naked, the woman slews across the back of the horse, and entangled with them is a length of drapery. The rearing horse is a version of a type of horse model that was used a number of times by Giambologna in his work. His first known engagement with the rearing horse as a subject came in 1565 when, for the festivities to celebrate the marriage of Francesco de’Medici and Joanna of Austria, he created four over-life size rearing horses in stucco to go on top of a triumphal arch. Giambologna subsequently explored the theme of the rearing horse through his versions of the Nessus and Deianira group (see NT 652912) as well as some stand-alone horses (Royal Collection, RCIN 35468; Avery and Radcliffe 1978, no. 153). Although the bronze Abduction of a Sabine evidently comes out of Giambologna’s world, it is not this sculptor’s work, but instead seems to have been invented by one of his most brilliant assistants and followers, the Dutch sculptor Adriaen de Vries (c. 1556-1626). Born in The Hague, like many Northern sculptors de Vries travelled as a young man to Italy, where he is recorded between c. 1580 and 1586 in Florence, where he was working as one of Giambologna’s assistants. Whilst in Florence he designed a small bronze two-figure group of the Abduction of a Sabine Woman, a version of which in the Victoria & Albert Museum is thought likely to have been cast for de Vries in Florence in 1585, by the leading bronze founder Fra Domenico Portigiani (Inv. A.145-1910; Scholten 1998, no. 1; Radcliffe/Penny 2004, no. 44, for the cast now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.). After Florence, Adriaen de Vries worked in Milan, Turin and, from 1595 to 1602, in Augsburg, where he produced two famous fountains in bronze, the Mercury Fountain (1599) and the bronze Hercules Fountain (1597–1602). Early in the century de Vries moved to Prague to work as court sculptor to the emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612), remaining in Prague after the emperor’s death and indeed for the remainder of his life. Many of the large-scale bronze sculptures made by de Vries whilst in Prague are today in Sweden, taken there as spoils of war in 1659. Although his northern roots are evident in his work, Adrian de Vries carried with him from his Florentine years the sophisticated mannerist style of Giambologna, which remained a strong influence on his work throughout his career. Adriaen de Vries was evidently deeply influenced by Giambologna’s monumental Abduction of the Sabine Woman, completed during his years in Florence. In fact it has often been thought that de Vries had an active part in the design and modelling of the large bronze relief set into the socle of the marble sculpture (Scholten 2025, pp. 46-48, fig. 2.14), whilst a silver two figure group, clearly derived from Giambologna’s model, has recently been attributed to him (Scholten 2025, pp. 46-49, figs. 2.8 and 2.10). De Vries also made his own small-scale two figure bronze group during his time in Florence, discussed above, whilst the recent identification of the Sudbury group as a new work by de Vries is further evidence of his particular interest in this subject, which is one that enables the exploration of female and male figures in tense struggles. The Sudbury Hall group was recently attributed to the sculptor by the de Vries specialist Frits Scholten of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, who dated it to c. 1600 (Scholten 2025). Analysis of the composition of the bronze alloy, by his Rijksmuseum colleague Arie Pappot, has indicated parallels with bronzes made by Adriaen de Vries during the years he spent working in Augsburg in Southern Germany. Further evidence of the Florentine influence within the composition comes in the figure of the rearing horse, which seems to be based on a bronze in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, that has been associated with Giambologna (Avery 2000, pp. 19-21, fig. 9; Dimitrios Zikos in Arbeid and Iozzo 2015, pp. 195-99). The horse appears again in Adriaen de Vries’s bronze rearing horse in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Scholten 1998, no. 21; Bassett 2008, pp. 118-24), and in the relief of Rudolf II introducing the Liberal Arts into Bohemia of 1609, in the Royal Collection (RCIN 35858; Scholten 1998, no. 23; Marsden 2025, no. 19). A further point of reference with the work of Adriaen de Vries is the small oval base on which the bronze is mounted. This type of base is found in some of Giambologna’s finest earlier small bronzes, such as his signed version of his composition of Nessus and Deianira in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, recorded in an inventory in 1587 (Avery and Racliffe 1978, no. 61; Syndram, Woelk and Minning 2006, pp. 27-33). But it was also used by Adriaen de Vries on several occasions for his small bronze figures, such as the Getty Museum Rearing Horse or a pacing horse in the National Gallery, Prague (Scholten 1998, no. 25; Bassett 2008, pp. 126-32). The Abduction of a Sabine Woman is now paired at Sudbury Hall with a version of Giambologna’s Nessus and Deianira, cast and finished by his assistant Antonio Susini. The groups are mounted on ebonised wooden stands with gilt-bronze mounts of average quality, which might date from as late as the nineteenth century. It is not known how or when the two bronzes arrived at Sudbury. They are first certainly recorded in the house in 1905, when they were displayed in the Drawing Room (Country Life 1905, p. 488). It is likely though that the two bronze groups were together and in Paris from at least the early 1700s, since they are very likely to have been the models for a series of close copies in bronze that began to be made in Paris from around 1720. The Abduction of a Sabine was though already in Paris before then, since a copy of this model was already in existence by 1715. Now in the Staatliche Museen in Dresden (Inv. H4 155/33; Holzhausen 1939, pp. 162-63, 185, fig. 2), it was one of a large consignment of bronzes and other sculptures acquired in Paris by the court official Raymond Leplat on behalf of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony (1670-1733) and sent to Dresden in that year. It is possible that the Nessus and Deianira now at Sudbury can be identified with an example that had belonged to Cardinal Richelieu (Armand Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, 1585-1642) and later the sculptor François Girardon (1628-1715), from whose collection it was sold at a public sale on 3 March 1718. The first record of copies of both bronzes being made in the form of a pair comes in 1720, in the inventory of the French sculptor Claude Devaux (c. 1665/70-1720: ‘Item two well cast and partly-finished groups, one depicting the Centaur carrying off Deianira and the other an abduction of a Sabine woman at a similar state of completion, with their pedestals not yet embellished [i.e. gilded?], valued in total at the sum of eight hundred livres’ (‘Item deux groups bien fondus et a demy réparé dont l’un représente le Centaure qui enlève Déjanire et l’autre un enlèvement de Sabine de meme réparé avec leurs pieds d’Estaux non garnis estimés le tout ensemble a la somme de huit cents livres’ Fouchy-Le Bras 2008, pp. 36, 46). A pair of the same bronzes appeared in the inventory of the stock of the marchand mercier Thomas-Joachim Hébert, taken on 22 May 1724 following the death of his wife Louise Desgodetz (Fouchy-Le Bras 2008, p. 36). A number of pairs of the French casts of these bronzes are known today, including examples in the Wallace Collection, London (Invs. S116 and S132; Wenley 2002, pp. 46-49) and the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich (Weihrauch 1956, pp. 100-102, nos. 124-25). Other versions pass through the art market quite frequently, but some may be nineteenth-century casts. These French casts differ from the Sudbury Hall bronzes in the bases or ‘terrasses’, which are distinctively French, embellished with small rocks and plants. Some pairs of these bronzes appear in French eighteenth-century auction sales, invariably described as from models by Giambologna. For example: Gaignat sale, 14 February 1769, lot 63; Sainte-Foix, 22 April 1782, lot 21; Chevalier de Clesne, 4 December 1786, lot 148. Examples continue to be recorded into the nineteenth century, e.g. Baron Michel, 1 February 1847, lot 96, formerly collection of M. de Montbreton; anonymous sale, 15 January 1849, lot 84. Of course, some of these entries are likely to refer to the same objects, as they passed through successive collections. It is also possible but unprovable that one or more of these auction records could refer to the pair of bronzes now at Sudbury Hall. Several of the pairs recorded in these sales were mounted on ebonised wooden bases with gilt-bronze mounts, for example the pair in the 1782 Sainte-Foix sale, described as mounted on 'ebonised wood bases, richly decorated with gilded bronzes.' Jeremy Warren March 2026