Detail of Rebecca and Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert by Cogniet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 2012

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

Accession Number: 2003.42.11

Label:

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 another painting, which was completed in 1828 and exhibited at the Salon of 1831 (Wallace Collection, London). The eclectic mix of medieval themes, exotic ethnicities, 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).

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/438632