Jeu de l’echarpe Series Bronze Sculpture by Agathon Léonard

Agathon Leonard’s Jeu de l’echarpe recalls the poses of the legendary eighteenth-century muse, Emma Hamilton. Beloved by society artists George Romney and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, paintings of her Grecian poses graced the halls of noble courts from England to France. In her series known as the Attitudes, the effervescent model flitted from pose to pose, from euphoric joy to bereft melancholy, twirling about in a translucent chemise and a varicolored Kashmiri scarf. Her husband’s collection of red-figure pottery was widely published in collector’s folios. Leonard’s Jeu de l’echarpe recreates a pose from both Lord Hamilton’s pottery and Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes, recreating the dancing pose of a maenad, or bacchante in French. The maenads were the manic followers of Dionysus, god of wine, whose drunken violence spelled the end of many a mythic hero. In Greece, traditional female garments would have consisted of belted peplos (a pleated shift of wool or linen). In this case, the peplos has been accentuated by a separate piece of fabric which the maenad holds aloft so as to billow in the wind, suggesting a finer, perhaps more expensive, and beautiful fabric.