Modelled in the round.

The girl’s left foot has broken off and been reaffixed. The lamb’s left ear is missing. The top right corner of the front of the base is missing.

Collection of the artist;¹¹According to the catalogue for the sale, Amsterdam (Frederik Muller), 14 November 1883 sqq. his widow Carolina Frederica Royer-Kerst (1801-1883); her sale, Amsterdam (Frederik Muller), 14 November 1883 sqq., no. 335; ...; collection Catharina van Eeghen (1860-1943) Amsterdam;²²Note RMA. her nephew, Christiaan Pieter van Eeghen (1880-1968), Amsterdam;³³Note RMA. by whom donated, with 11 other objects, to the museum, 1943

Object number: BK-15525

Credit line: Gift of the heirs of C. van Eeghen, Amsterdam

This sculpture in unfired clay (terra secca) by Louis Royer (1793-1868), depicts a seated, semi-clad girl, giving a lamb a drink from a bowl. The depiction should perhaps be interpreted as an allegory of Innocence. Influenced by romantic sentiments that became fashionable during the late stage of Neo-Classicism, Royer made a few more sculptures with such somewhat sentimental themes in the early 1830s. Take, for instance, his terracotta of an Amor with a dog, as an allegory of Fidelity (BK-15521) and the marble bust of a Greek girl (BK-1967-21). Akin in style and workmanship to the present sculpture is a clay statuette by Royer in the Amsterdam Museum which shows a virtually identical girl standing next to a pedestal and holding an ouroboros in her hand.⁴⁴Amsterdam Museum, inv. no. BA 2408; M. Jonker et al., In beeld gebracht: Beeldhouwkunst uit de collectie van het Amsterdams Historisch Museum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1995, no. 339.

Langendijk bracketed the clay sculpture with an in fact not very similar charcoal sketch by Royer portraying a fully-clothed, seated female figure, with not only a lamb (?) but also a small dog beside her,⁵⁵Nijmegen, Catholic Documentation Centre, archive Alberdingk Thijm. and with a marble statue, known only from a photograph, in the hall of an unspecified villa in Atre, Belgium.⁶⁶Written communication Eugène Langendijk, 5 January 1994. Photocopies of the charcoal drawing and the interior with the marble sculpture in Object File RMA. According to Langendijk the sculpture may have come from the collection of the Amsterdam family De Vos. However, it is impossible to verify the connection between the latter work and the present sculpture on the basis of this unclear photo, let alone the attribution of the marble statue to Royer.

The present figure may just as well relate to a different sculpture entirely, or to a work that was never realized. The complete signature and the date (1832) incised when the clay was still wet, could also suggest that Royer had intended it to be an autonomous work in itself. However, for unknown reasons the sculptor did not finish the work by firing it, and until his death, it remained in his workshop. The sculpture then passed to his widow and after her death in 1883 was sold together with many other works from Royer’s estate.⁷⁷Sale, collection F. Royer-Kerst (1801-1883), Amsterdam (Frederik Muller), 14-15 November 1883, no. 335.

Bieke van der Mark, 2026

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 444, with earlier literature

B. van der Mark, 2026, 'Louis Royer, Girl with a Lamb, The Hague, 1832', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20035878