3-034-622 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Brigands and Captives" by Layraud, in the French Gallery, International Exhibition, 1871. Engraving of a painting. 'The painter chose a handsome, fair-haired northern type for the victims,...as affording the strongest artistic contrast to the swarthy, black-haired, villainous and brutal aspect of their captors...The scene is laid in a rocky defile, probably of the savage Abruzzi, the desolate haunt only of the vulture and of worse human creatures, who make a prey of the living as well as the dead. With that hideous association of religion with basest villany and murder which is almost peculiar to Italian brigand age, a cross has been set up in the middle-distance, perhaps for devotion (!), more probably to mark the grave of one of the gang who has gone to his account. A couple of mounted travellers have been waylaid and captured...and here, to this mountain fastness, they are brought, to await the chance of their being ransomed...or, failing that, to be murdered and possibly mutilated...the crew...gather, threatening and truculent, round the unfortunates, and the chief, with a revolver in one hand and a pen in the other, presents to the male victim a paper with the hard terms of release for him to sign on pain of instant death'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.