Rebecca at the Well

Ives, a Connecticut native, modeled "Rebecca at the Well" in his Rome studio in 1854. Like other American expatriate sculptors who worked in a neoclassical style, he derived many subjects from the Bible, especially the Old Testament. In Genesis 24:11–23, Rebecca was chosen to be the bride of Isaac, the son of Abraham, after offering him water she had drawn from a well.　In Ives’s youthful figure of Rebecca, he was capitalizing on the renown he had achieved with sentimental images of children. The sculpture would prove to be his most successful work with twenty-five marble replicas sold over a period of forty years. Studio records indicate that half were sold to New York-area clientele, who constituted a ready patronage base, both through their Grand Tour travels to Italy and Ives’s savvy exhibiting and marketing of his work in the United States.