Modelled and fired. Finished with a pale beige final coat.

The woman’s toes have sustained slight damage.

Collection of the artist; whose sale, Amsterdam (Roos), 17-19 November 1868, no. 6; to Heukensfeld, fl. 16.50; …; sale, collection Josephus Albertus Alberdingk Thijm (1820-1889, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (Frederik Muller), 10-12 December 1889, ? no. 137, fl. 12 (with a deaccessioned terracotta of a standing girl by the same sculptor, BK-NM-9002), to the museum, 1890 ¹¹P.K. van Daalen, Nederlandse beeldhouwers in de negentiende eeuw, The Hague 1957 gives as number 1499.

Object number: BK-NM-9003

The Bible story of the Flood (Genesis 7) was a rewarding subject for many artists in the romantic period. The drama of those who were doomed to die by drowning offered an excellent opportunity to depict all manner of powerful, compelling emotions (cf. BK-NM-8829). In 1832 the Dutch-born sculptor Matthijs Kessels (1784-1836), who worked for most of his life in strictly neoclassical style, made the first sketches for his more-than-life-size Flood that he completed in 1835. This expressive image is one of the earliest examples of sculpture inspired by romantic ideas, and was received as a masterpiece both in Rome, where Kessels lived, and in the country of his birth.²²W. Bergé, Heimwee naar de klassieken: De beelden van Mathieu Kessels en zijn tijdgenoten, 1815-1840, exh. cat. Den Bosch (Noordbrabants Museum) 1994-95, p. 92, nos. K133-K140. Around 1833 Louis Royer (1793-1868) also began experimenting with this subject in The Hague. He made at least three terracottas and two drawings with scenes from the Flood,³³The terracottas are mentioned in the sale catalogue of the artist’s estate, sale Louis Royer (1793-1868), Amsterdam (Roos), 17 November 1868, nos. 4-6; the drawings are housed in the Catholic Documentation Centre, Nijmegen, archive Alberdingk Thijm, inv. nos. 217/5461 and 5462. presumably in preparation for a large sculpture which was never executed. Two of the terracottas ended up in the Rijksmuseum; the whereabouts of the third is unknown. There is a drawing of the best documented of the two groups in the Rijksmuseum (BK-15519) which, considering the precision and carefully rendered effect of light and shade, Royer would have made afterwards from the terracotta.⁴⁴A. Jacobs, Welgevormd: Mechelse beeldhouwers in Europa (1780-1850), exh. cat. Mechelen (Lamot/Museum Schepenhuis) 2006, p. 120. The other terracotta (shown here) is a variant of the first, in mirror-image, in which drapery covers the lower part of the woman’s body. The serpent behind them on the base of the piece also features in Kessels’ Flood and should probably be interpreted as a refence to the Fall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:9-11). Their disobedience also incurred God’s punishment: banishment from the Garden of Eden. Accordingly, the Fall is considered as a prefiguration of the Flood. Incidentally, at the beginning of the 1860s, Royer also made a monumental group with Adam and Eve, commissioned by the Dutch Princess Marianne. There, the sculptor played in a similar way with the composition of a man tending to a woman.⁵⁵G. van den Hout and E. Langendijk (eds.), Louis Royer 1793-1868: Een Vlaamse beeldhouwer in Amsterdam, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Amstelkring) 1994, p. 31. This marble sculpture, completed in 1863, was originally displayed in Marianne’s museum at Schloss Reinhartshausen (near Wiesbaden), but today stands in the castle garden. In view of their compositional and thematic kinship, is it probably no coincidence that the Amsterdam collector Christiaan van Eeghen purchased both a preliminary study of Adam and Eve (present whereabouts unknown) and one of the three terracottas of the Flood from Royer’s estate.⁶⁶G. van den Hout and E. Langendijk (eds.), Louis Royer 1793-1868: Een Vlaamse beeldhouwer in Amsterdam, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Amstelkring) 1994, p. 31. No doubt, the two groups would have formed pendants in his collection.

Bieke van der Mark, 2026

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 447, with earlier literature

B. van der Mark, 2026, 'Louis Royer, The Flood, Netherlands, c. 1833', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20035880