Young Satyress Running with an Owl's Nest and Young Satyr Running with an Owl (pair of statuettes) (1770s): Art, History and Details

Young Satyress Running with an Owl's Nest and Young Satyr Running with an Owl (pair of statuettes) (1770s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Clodion (French, 1738–1814).

The work and its context

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

These works by the French sculptor Claude Michel, called Clodion, show a pair of young satyrs. Clodion was fond of depicting characters from classical antiquity in his work, and the subject of child or baby satyrs in Bacchanalian celebrations appears often in the work of Rococo artists. The female satyr wraps a plump arm around a nest filled with baby birds, while her male counterpart holds an owl. Balancing on one foot, the two flee the scene of their theft.

Object facts

• Title: Young Satyress Running with an Owl's Nest and Young Satyr Running with an Owl (pair of statuettes)
• Date: 1770s
• Creator attribution: Clodion (French, 1738–1814)
• Culture: France
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: terracotta
• Dimensions: Overall: 32.1 x 14.8 x 18.1 cm (12 5/8 x 5 13/16 x 7 1/8 in.); with base: 45.1 cm (17 3/4 in.)
• Collection: Sculpture
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1944.129

Collection credit

The Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Catalogue of the Elisabeth Severance Prentiss Collection : Bequest of Elisabeth Severance Prentiss, 1944. [Cleveland]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1944.
• Milliken, William M. “French Furniture and Sculpture.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 31, no. 6 (1944).
• Ditner, David Charles. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century European Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art. 1986.

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.