Mazeppa et les loups

In the 1820s Byron's poetry had swept France, and one poem in particular fired up the young Romantic painters. It told the legend of Mazeppa, a nobleman caught in a love affair, who as punishment was stripped, lashed to the back of a wild horse, and sent galloping off into the wilderness. Vernet painted this version in 1826 and showed it at the Paris Salon the following year. He takes the most desperate stretch of the ride, the exhausted horse and its helpless rider driven on through the dark while a pack of wolves closes in behind. It is Romanticism at full pitch, the lone man at the mercy of nature. The real Mazeppa was a Ukrainian hetman, and his flight was a tale that had grown in the retelling since the days of Voltaire.