An Imposing Late 19th Century Life Size Bronze Busts of a Middle Eastern Couple Embracing By Charles Cordier

$22,500

Charles Henri Joseph Cordier

The woman’s head nestled up against the mans face and neck.

Signed H.J. Cordier on the base.

Charles Cordier (1827 – 1905) was one of the greatest French 19^th-century sculptors. Appointed ethnographic sculptor to the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris in 1851, a post he held for fifteen years, Cordier established an international reputation for himself through his sympathetic and arresting portrayals of different racial types. The ethnographic busts for which he became most famous often betray a startling naturalism, tempered by dramatic poses and exotic costumes.

Interest in the different peoples of the globe preoccupied French society in the nineteenth-century. The fields of anthropology and ethnology became increasingly high profile. Exhibitions which showcased living people from other regions of the world drew huge crowds. Chiefly concerned with the search for beauty in all peoples, Cordier wrote in 1865 before his trip to Egypt, ‘I wish to present the race just as it is, in its own beauty, absolutely true to life, with its passions, its fatalism, in its quiet pride and conceit, in its fallen grandeur, but the principles of which have remained since antiquity’ (as quoted by Margerie, op. cit., p. 28). Few contemporary commentators, with the exception of writers such as Victor Hugo, the Abbé Grégoire, and Madame de Staël, offered such enlightened views. In his official role at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Cordier embarked on a number of government sponsored missions to different parts of the world in order to record a series of modern racial types in sculpture.

Sculpture
Height – 29 inches / 74cm
Width – 23 inches / 58cm
Depth – 16 inches / 41cm

Pedestal
Height – 42 inches / 107cm