Bacchus and Ariadne (c. 1880): Art, History and Details

Bacchus and Ariadne (c. 1880) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is John La Farge (American, 1835–1910).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In the early 1880s, John La Farge worked with a team of artists, including the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), to produce decorations for the home of the American industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt. La Farge's designs made many allusions to the art of the Italian Renaissance and to the splendid decorations created for the Medici banking family in Florence. In this drawing he used a medium common in Italian drawings—red chalk—in self-conscious emulation of Renaissance practice.

Object facts

• Title: Bacchus and Ariadne
• Date: c. 1880
• Creator attribution: John La Farge (American, 1835–1910)
• Culture: America
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: red chalk (rubbed in places)
• Dimensions: Image: 41 x 36.8 cm (16 1/8 x 14 1/2 in.); Sheet: 52.9 x 42.6 cm (20 13/16 x 16 3/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - American 19th Century
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1954.360

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.