About this
work
Object details
- Title:
- Leander, Dying on the Shore of the Hellespont
- Date:
- 1886
- Dimensions:
- 95,5 × 193 × 83 cm, 1207kg
- Inventory number:
- 1066
More about this work
Every night, Leander swam across the Hellespont so as to be with his beloved Hero. To guide him he swam towards a candle she lit in a tower. One stormy night the candle was blown out . Exhausted, Leander drowned. The next morning Hero fount the lifeless body of her lover washed ashore among the rocks. Overcome with grief, she leaped into the sea herself. This tragic love story is told by the Roman poet Ovid in his Heroides
Joris Geefs received great praise for Leander, dying on the shore of the Hellespont. He exhibited a plaster version at the Salons in Paris (1879), Brussels (1881) and Antwerp (1882). The KMSKA then commissioned a marble version. In a letter of 13 September 1882 to the board of the academy the sculptor promised that he would make just a single version, and said that it would be of the finest Carrara marble. However, a recent restoration report revealed that he actually used Sicilian or Arbescato marble – white marble with grey veins. That was the version shown at the World’s Fair in Antwerp in 1885. It was not until 25 June the following year that the sculpture was installed in the Musée Moderne.
The myth gave Geefs the opportunity to depict an athletic male nude. Leander lies stretched out on the rocks. A block of stone beneath his hip and the raised left leg create a triangular composition. The head, arms and right leg are lower than the torso. The eyes and mouth are slightly open. In addition to the emotional effect, the erotic content is unmistakable.
The composition is comparable to The fall of Phaethon of 1700-1711 by the Ghent artist Dominique Lefevre (London, The Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. A.4-1958), but it is not known whether Geefs knew that statue.
Between 1870 and 1885 tension arose between traditional and more ‘realistic’ sculpture. The conservative juries of the official Salons raised obstacles to the new approach. So artists who wanted to receive commissions had to make academic sculptures. A few of them sought a way out by portraying emotional anecdotes with gesticulating figures and drawn faces in good, rubbed marble.
The 1885 Salon of the World’s Fair, where this Leander went on show, teemed with innovation, and included works by Jef Lambeaux, among other. That spring, at the exhibition of Les XX, Constantin Meunier contributed socially engaged sculptures of labourers in their working clothes and with weathered faces and bodies that exuded great expressive power.
Even the conservative press judged that the aesthetics of Geefs’s works was outmoded. He was given a place ‘on the road... that his father had taken so gloriously’ (Handelsblad, 19 August 1885). The traditional style in which the Geefs family had excelled (his father and brothers were sculptors too), had flourished a generation earlier, and from then on was labelled ‘old-fashioned’.
Joris Geefs received great praise for Leander, dying on the shore of the Hellespont. He exhibited a plaster version at the Salons in Paris (1879), Brussels (1881) and Antwerp (1882). The KMSKA then commissioned a marble version. In a letter of 13 September 1882 to the board of the academy the sculptor promised that he would make just a single version, and said that it would be of the finest Carrara marble. However, a recent restoration report revealed that he actually used Sicilian or Arbescato marble – white marble with grey veins. That was the version shown at the World’s Fair in Antwerp in 1885. It was not until 25 June the following year that the sculpture was installed in the Musée Moderne.
The myth gave Geefs the opportunity to depict an athletic male nude. Leander lies stretched out on the rocks. A block of stone beneath his hip and the raised left leg create a triangular composition. The head, arms and right leg are lower than the torso. The eyes and mouth are slightly open. In addition to the emotional effect, the erotic content is unmistakable.
The composition is comparable to The fall of Phaethon of 1700-1711 by the Ghent artist Dominique Lefevre (London, The Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. A.4-1958), but it is not known whether Geefs knew that statue.
Between 1870 and 1885 tension arose between traditional and more ‘realistic’ sculpture. The conservative juries of the official Salons raised obstacles to the new approach. So artists who wanted to receive commissions had to make academic sculptures. A few of them sought a way out by portraying emotional anecdotes with gesticulating figures and drawn faces in good, rubbed marble.
The 1885 Salon of the World’s Fair, where this Leander went on show, teemed with innovation, and included works by Jef Lambeaux, among other. That spring, at the exhibition of Les XX, Constantin Meunier contributed socially engaged sculptures of labourers in their working clothes and with weathered faces and bodies that exuded great expressive power.
Even the conservative press judged that the aesthetics of Geefs’s works was outmoded. He was given a place ‘on the road... that his father had taken so gloriously’ (Handelsblad, 19 August 1885). The traditional style in which the Geefs family had excelled (his father and brothers were sculptors too), had flourished a generation earlier, and from then on was labelled ‘old-fashioned’.
Acquisition history
purchase: Joris Geefs, 1882
Copyright and legal
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