These charming terracotta sculptures depict a boy and girl, identifiable as satyrs by their pointed ears and furry legs and hooves, as well as the vine wreathes that adorn their hair and the garlands around their bodies. The two satyr children have just stolen the nest of a pair of owls and are shown scampering away. The boy clutches in one hand a (remarkably calm) adult bird, while in the other he originally held a thyrsus, a sort of staff carried by the followers of Bacchus, which is now largely broken off. The girl holds the nest, still containing four fledgling owls. Known by the popular title Les Dénicheurs, the figures have been, from the time that they were made, among the most celebrated and popular of the French sculptor Clodion’s compositions.

Clodion is today recognized as one of the greatest of French eighteenth-century sculptors. His best work on a small scale is lyrical in nature, capturing in its range the shift in taste during the second half of the eighteenth century, from the late Baroque and Rococo through to a refined Neoclassicism. He was born in Nancy, the youngest son within a large family, several members of whom also worked as sculptors. Christened Claude, his sobriquet Clodion (“little Claude”) was adopted to distinguish him from an older brother. Clodion studied in the Parisian workshop of his uncle Lambert-Sigisbert Adam (1700–1759) and then in that of Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714–1785), before in 1762 he traveled to Rome, where he was to spend the next eight years. Rome proved a crucial formative experience for the young sculptor, not least because it enabled him to study at first hand the small terracotta models and sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which were greatly to influence Clodion’s own expert use of the material. After his return to Paris in 1771, Clodion became highly successful as a sculptor, his small terracotta groups especially sought after. Even in his lifetime, he had many close followers and imitators.

Satyrs were among the followers of two important gods in Greek and Roman mythology, Bacchus, god of wine, and Pan, god of woods and fields. Through the Renaissance reinterpretation of these ancient cultures in the early modern period, they became once more highly popular, even archetypal figures in art. Half-goat, half-human, satyrs represented the vital powers of nature and, as such, were symbolic of sensual pleasures and unbridled excess, especially sexual. Sexual connotations are certainly present in Clodion’s pair of figures, with the boy originally carrying a rigid staff and the girl a nest. But they remain below the surface in these plump and decorative, thoroughly Rococo creatures, a world away from the Straus Collection’s captive satyr from Renaissance Padua (cat. 58; 44.594).

The inspiration for these spirited figures may have come from Vincennes porcelain statuettes modeled in the 1750s after designs by François Boucher, notably a pair of figures of a girl carrying a little bird cage and a boy carrying birds.¹ However, the boy satyr in particular also owes much to the figures of small children by the Flemish sculptor François Duquesnoy (1597–1643), who lived and worked in Rome for much of his career, and whose work remained highly influential in France throughout the eighteenth century. Very similar infant satyrs may already be seen in the vases adorned with reliefs of playing children that are regarded as among Clodion’s earliest works, made when he was living in Rome.² The figure of the satyr boy was the first to be conceived, shortly after the return from Italy. In 1773 Clodion exhibited at the Paris Salon a small marble figure described as “An infant satyr holding an owl between his arms. In marble one foot in height.” A terracotta figure of the boy is recorded in 1777 in the auction in Paris of the collection of the Prince de Conti, when it was paired with a statuette of a little girl holding a pigeon and its cage by the sculptor Louis-Félix de La Rue. The infant satyress on the other hand is first recorded, as a pair with the boy, in sales in Paris in 1783 and in 1788. The frequency with which they reappear in sales in the following decades, both as a pair and as single figures, attests to their early success.

The Straus collection Nest-Robbers are well modeled and with a strong sense of psychological interaction between the two protagonists. They are the principal pair of these figures to survive after the pair in the Cleveland Museum of Art, which are generally regarded as having the strongest claim to autograph status.³ The pair of figures in Cleveland are more finely modeled than their counterparts in Houston, and also more clearly conceived as a pair. Whereas the figures of the girl satyrs are similar, there are some differences between the two boy satyrs; the torso of the Cleveland figure has a simple strap of material across his chest, whereas in the Houston version this has become a garland of vine leaves; the animal skin that is attached to this strap extends further over the left thigh of the boy in Houston than it does in his Cleveland counterpart. Another well-modeled single figure of the boy satyr of the same type as the variant in Houston, except that the pupils of his eyes are not incised as in the Houston figures, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.⁴

The signatures on the backs of the tree trunks also differentiate the pairs in Cleveland and in Houston. Over the course of his career, Clodion used a variety of signatures, which can help with approximate dating of his works. The figures in Cleveland have similar signatures, of a type used by Clodion during the 1770s, whereas those on the backs of the tree trunks in the Houston pair are in fact very different. That for the girl satyr, in cursive script, is similar to those on the Cleveland figures, thus consistent with the 1770s, but the more regular signature in capitals on the boy satyr is a type used by Clodion in particular during the 1780s and 1790s.

It would seem therefore that the figures in Houston are likely to be replicas made in Clodion’s workshop, perhaps in the 1780s. They are considerably superior to a third pair of the figures, in the Musée Historique Lorrain, on loan from the Musée du Louvre, which have been considered to be pastiches from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.⁵ One indicator of a later dating is the fact that unlike the figures in Cleveland, Houston, and Philadelphia, the animal skin covers the genitals of the satyr. The same feature is seen in both figures in a much larger pair of these figures recently on the art market, dated to the first half of the nineteenth century.⁶

These very popular figures were also reproduced in bronze, for example a figure of the boy satyr in the 1968 French Bronzes exhibition at the Knoedler gallery in New York.⁷ The boy satyr and the girl with the pigeon and its cage by La Rue were made into furnishing bronzes, often candelabra, for example the pair in the Aubert sale in 1786, which had two gilt-bronze arms for candles.⁸ A pair of these candelabra is in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.⁹ Bronze versions pairing Clodion’s satyr and satyress on the other hand, such as a pair in in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,¹⁰ are all likely to date from the nineteenth century.

The history of the Straus figures may be traced from their first recorded appearance in the celebrated collections of the Villa San Donato outside Florence, assembled principally by Anatole Demidoff, Prince of San Donato (1812–1870), and his nephew Paul Demidoff (1839–1885).¹¹ The pair of infant satyrs featured in the large sale held in 1880 at the villa, after Prince Paul had decided to move to the former Medici property of Pratolino. With full-page illustrations of each figure, which were described as “sparkling with spirit and with life,” they were evidently regarded as among the highlights of the sale. They were bought for the relatively high sum of 5,700 francs by the Parisian dealer Charles Mannheim, who must have sold them to the collector M. Lebeuf de Montgermont, in whose sale they appeared in 1891. They were next sold in 1935 at the sale of an anonymous collector, Monsieur X, whose collection was described by Edouard Salin “as a well-known collection from the high Parisian bourgeoisie.” In the illustration in the 1935 catalogue, the male figure still retained his thyrsus and the trail of vine leaves across his chest was intact, so the figure must have suffered damage at some time between 1935, and its entry into the Museum’s collections in 1944.
—Jeremy Warren