Ferdinand Barbedienne

objet/ferdinand barbedienne 8ffrdwT 632950320 / Ventes en cours

objet/ferdinand barbedienne 8ffrdwT 632950320

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objet/ferdinand barbedienne 8ffrdwT 632950320

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Ferdinand Barbedienne

Bronze with brown patina by Paul Dubois (1829-1905), “Saint John the Baptist as a Child,” cast by Ferdinand Barbedienne, height 65 cm The bronze stands on its rocky base treated in naturalist cast, where the water and desert stone emerge. The young saint stands there, the body still bearing the uncertainty of adolescence, the weight of the body subtly shifted onto one leg while the other advances, animating the entire figure with a restrained movement. The right arm rises with a gravity beyond his years, the index finger extended toward the heavens in this gesture of announcement that has defined the character since The Precurseurs of Italian painting; the left hand, meanwhile, closes its fingers around the reed staff that the cross extends, while the loincloth tied at the waist, treated in broad, biting folds, breaks with its harsh relief the continuous harmony of the modeling, the sole discreet echo of life in the desert. It is in this tension between the fragility of the child’s body and the solemnity of the gesture that Paul Dubois attains the quintessence of his art. Trained in the milieu of Florentine quattrocento, from which he drew the taste for supple modeling and sincere lines, he here rejects the emphases of the grand academic style in favor of an almost intimate truth: the curly hair treated in living strands, the mouth slightly open as if about to speak, the gaze not fixed on anything earthly. The bronze, patinated in these deep, warm browns that make light vibrate on the torso’s planes, faithfully reproduces the original plaster’s modeling, a testament to the care the Barbedienne foundry took in reproducing the work. Few sculptors of his time knew, as Dubois did, how to coexist in a single figure the candor of childhood and the spiritual burden of the sacred subject; it is precisely this meeting that crystallizes here, in the upward movement of the arm and the gathered silence of the face. The plinth bears the inscription “Rome, 1861,” reminding that the plaster model was conceived in Rome during the artist’s independent stay, before its notable presentation at the Salon of 1863. The bronze also bears the reduction stamp Collas. Paul Dubois remains one of the most influential figures of nineteenth-century French sculpture. Discovered at the Salon of 1863 with this Saint John the Baptist as a Child, hailed by critics as a masterpiece of spiritualized naturalism, he pursued a career marked by prestigious commissions, including the tomb of General de Lamoricière at Nantes Cathedral, regarded as one of the pinnacles of the century’s funerary art. Appointed director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1878, a member of the Institute and grand officier of the Legion of Honour, he was unanimously recognized by his peers as one of the greatest sculptors of his era, whose work permanently shaped the renewal of French classicism.

Estimation:€1,400

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