Currently not on view
Hector Censuring Helen and Paris,
ca. 1820
Active in the southern Netherlands, Hendrickx studied in Brussels under Jacques-Louis David. Seeking a subject from ancient Greek and Roman history and mythology with a moralizing theme, he chose this scene from Homer’s Iliad. Paris’s abduction of Helen from her husband, Menelaus, king of Sparta, has sparked the Trojan War. Hector, Troy’s mightiest warrior, chastises his brother, Paris, for lingering in the palace with the beautiful Helen, queen of Sparta. “You would yourself reproach any other whom you might see shrinking from hateful war,” Hector says. “But get up, lest soon the city blaze with consuming fire.”
Information
ca. 1820
Europe, France
French private collection since the 1800s; 1914 purchase by Mr. I.J. Belmont [1]; 1965 purchase by Princeton University Art Museum from Mrs. I. J. Belmont.
[1] According to accession card, Belmont purchased the painting from an officer in the French army who had inherited it from his grandfather and who said the painting had been in his family for almost a century.
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- Thomas E. Crow, Painters and public life in eighteenth-century Paris, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985)., p. 247, pl. 119
- Philippe Bordes, Jacques-Louis David: empire to exile, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005)., p. 350, note 50
