Bacchanalia1.0233_Vigée-LeBrun

Bacchanalia1.0233_Vigée-LeBrun

Nelson-Atkins Museum
ogcma Bacchanalia1.0000_Reid
Classical Sources:
Herodotus, Histories 2.48-49.
Euripides, Bacchae, passim
Orphic Hymns, 54, "To Silenus, Satyrus, and the Priestesses of Dionysus"
Terence, The Self-Tormentor
Diod. Sic., Biblioteca 4.3
Vergil Georgics, 1.380-96
Ovid, Met., 3.528ff.
Ovid, Met. 4.1-41
Ovid, Fasti 1.353ff., 392ff., 6.319ff., 489ff.
Philostratus Imagines 1.18

John Hoppner (1758-1810), "Portrait of Emily St. Clare as a Bacchante," (formerly known as "The Tambourine Girl"), 1806-1807, oil on canvas, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of Robert Lehman, object no. 45-1.

Hoppner was commissioned by Sir John Fleming Leicester to paint the portrait of his mistress, Emily St. Clare. Fleming also commissioned at least thirteen other potraits of the young woman from other contemporary artists. Hoppner achieves the portrayal of the subject's vivacity by allusion to classical mythological figure and her association with like-minded peers in the background.

A young woman in white neoclassical dress dances joyfully, playing a tambourine, in a pastoral landscape at sunset.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1400 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University Press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.