Rebecca at the Well

Rebecca at the Well

Chauncey Bradley Ives

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ives, a Connecticut native, modeled "Rebecca at the Well" in his Rome studio in 1854. Like other American expatriate sculptors who worked in a neoclassical style, he derived many subjects from the Bible, especially the Old Testament. In Genesis 24:11–23, Rebecca was chosen to be the bride of Isaac, the son of Abraham, after offering him water she had drawn from a well.　In Ives’s youthful figure of Rebecca, he was capitalizing on the renown he had achieved with sentimental images of children. The sculpture would prove to be his most successful work with twenty-five marble replicas sold over a period of forty years. Studio records indicate that half were sold to New York-area clientele, who constituted a ready patronage base, both through their Grand Tour travels to Italy and Ives’s savvy exhibiting and marketing of his work in the United States.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.