Two women being abducted by three masked men

Abraham Bosse (c. 1604-1676) was a notable engraver, painter and architect who was active during the Louis III and earlier Louis XIV periods in France. Stylistically he was inspired by his senior, Jacques Callot, who is more famous today but Bosse's career was far longer and more prolific. Under the influence of the mathematician, Girard Desargues, Bosse mastered perspective, of which he became a professor at the Academy of Painting. Elected an honorary academician, he was subsequently expelled because of his serious quarrels with colleagues, particularly the all-important Charles Le Brun. Bosse's prints—mostly of allegories, genre scenes, frontispieces, and costumes—include The Ages of Man (1636) and The Marriage of Ladislas IV (1645). One of Bosse’s best-known writings is Traité des manières de dessiner les ordres de l’architecture antique (1664; “Treatise on the Ways of Designing the Orders of Classical Architecture”). His paintings, which today are rare, include The Foolish Virgins. Contributing to the development of caricature and cartoon, Bosse also lampooned trades and professions in his dispassionate woodcuts and engravings.

This torrid scene showing the abduction of two women by three masked men, with corpses lying nearby, illustrates an episode in the popular romantic novel L'Ariane, by Jean Desmarets, whose 1639 edition Bosse illustrated. It is based on a design by the artist Claude Vignon (1593-1670), as the signatures attest.  The etching is part of the Old Master print collection in the so-called King George IV album, acquired by the Dominion Museum in 1910.

Sources:

British Museum Collection online, https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1345831&partId=1&searchText=vig non+bosse&page=1

Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 'Abraham Bosse', https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abraham-Bosse

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   April 2019