Shaped using a mould.

Good. Complete with its original (?) wooden frame. The reverse of the frame is closed-off with a fragment of a French print mounted on cardboard, depicing a theatre audience observing an open-air performance from balconies within an architectural setting. Inscribed, in mirror-image: RAPT DES SABI[NES].

…; from the Koninklijk Kabinet van Zeldzaamheden, The Hague, transferred to the museum, 1885

Object number: BK-NM-7349

A young woman, clad in a chiton, is deep in thought beside a funerary monument consisting of an urn on a pedestal. The pedestal has the Latin inscription CRVDELI FUNERI EX[S]TINCIVM (cut off by a cruel death), a quotation from the lament on the death of the mythological shepherd, Daphnis, written by Virgil in his Eclogues (V:20). This indicates that the sorrowing woman must be seen as a nymph or a muse, mourning the tragic death of the Sicilian shepherd. The scroll and the trumpet attached to the tree trunk on the woman’s left refer to the fame Daphnis had achieved with his poetic art. He is said to have been the originator of pastoral (bucolic) poetry.

The composition and neo-classicist style of the relief are reminiscent of examples by Canova, but this is a very basic derivative. The originally classical theme of a sorrowing figure beside a funerary urn was widely used in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, obviously largely in a funerary context.¹¹Cf. two examples by Gilles Lambert Godecharle, see C. Baisier et al., Terracotta’s uit de 17de en 18de eeuw: De verzameling Van Herck, exh. cat. Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) 2000, nos. 36 and 37. The bucolic and elegiac poetry of Virgil and Manilius also underwent a revival at that time and was used in epitaphs, amongst other things. It is, therefore, quite possible that this relief had been part of a decoration on a tomb or memorial.

The material in which the relief is made had previously been identified, erroneously, as porcelain or marble.²²Note RMA. However, it concerns a man-made material intended to imitate marble. In the early nineteenth century different types of artificial stone were experimented with on a large scale in France and America, the aim being to approximate the characteristics and possibilities of natural stone as far as possible.³³H.W. Linsten et al., Geschiedenis van de techniek in Nederland: De wording van een moderne samenleving 1800-1890, vol. 3, Zutphen 1993, p. 218. The use of artificial marble means that the relief was shaped using a mould and was probably made in series. However, as yet no other versions of the piece are known.

Bieke van der Mark, 2026

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 433

B. van der Mark, 2026, 'anonymous, Muse or Nymph, Mourning over the Death of Daphnis, France, c. 1775 - c. 1800', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20035871