エウロペの略奪

By 1908 the story of Europa carried off by Jupiter as a bull had been painted for centuries as high drama, all foam and terror. Vallotton, a Swiss-born painter working in Paris among the group called the Nabis, gives you almost the opposite. His bull is a plain brown farm animal, half-submerged, and Europa clambers onto its back with the unhurried concentration of someone climbing into a bath. The colour is flat, the light even, the water a smooth sheet. Vallotton had made his name on woodcuts and cool, deadpan interiors, and that same detachment settles over this ancient abduction. The couple who later owned it, the Hahnlosers of Bern, were among his steadiest collectors, and their son gave it to this museum in 1946.