Rebecca and Brian de Bois-Guilbert

Rebecca and Brian de Bois-Guilbert is an oil on canvas by the French artist Léon Cogniet, from 1828. It is held at the Wallace Collection, in London.^[1]

The work depicts a scene from the novel Ivanhoe (1819), one of Walter Scott's Waverley Novels, that takes place in the late 12th-century, during the conflict between the Normans and the Saxons in England.^[2] Scott's stories were very popular in France during the Restoration period and a number of romantic painters drew on them for inspiration for their works. It also reflected the growing influence of Orientalism in art.^[3] It portrays the abduction of the Jewish Rebecca by a member of the Knights Templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, who was infatuated with her. He rides by her side, in a black horse, while she, beautifully dressed in pink, is carried away in a white horse, by his enslaved black Moor slave. In the background, the fictional Torquilstone Castle is seen in flames.^[4]

The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1831 at the Louvre in Paris.^[5] Today it is in the Wallace Collection, in London, having been acquired by the Marquess of Hertford, in 1846.^[6] A smaller version, possibly also from 1828, is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.^[7]

• Ingamells, John. The Wallace Collection: French nineteenth century. Trustees of the Wallace Collection, 1985.
• Riobó, Carlos. Caught between the Lines: Captives, Frontiers, and National Identity in Argentine Literature and Art. University of Nebraska Press, 2019.
• Tarling, Nicholas. Orientalism and the Operatic World. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.