Charles-Auguste Fraikin

Estimate

30,000 - 50,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

Charles-Auguste Fraikin
L'Artiste (Allegory of Painting)
signed: C.A. FRAIKIN and with a label of the Exposition Universelle in Paris, 1878, printed: De Beaux Arts, le Commisseur Général / Paris Champs des Mars, and inscribed: Belgique
white marble, on a painted wood base
marble: 123 by 64cm., 4 1/2 by 25 1/8 in.
base: 79cm., 31 1/8

Exhibited

Paris, Exposition Universelle, 1878

Literature

Catalogue officiel, Tome 1, Exposition universelle internationale de 1878 à Paris, Paris, 1878, p. 317

Catalogue Note

Charles-Auguste Fraikin studied at the Brussels Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under Louis Jéhotte, and was one of the most successful sculptors in mid 19th-century Belgium. His masterpiece, L'Amour Captif, which propelled him into fame, won the gold medal at the Exposition Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels in 1845. It was subsequently exhibited in London (1851) and Dublin (1853), and a copy was ordered for the Hermitage in St Petersburg. Fraikin’s sculptures, which embody a warm, sentimental blend of classicism, and look back to the Rococo terracottas of Clodion, were particularly favoured by the Belgian bourgeoisie.

The present marble, a slightly frivolous interpretation of an Allegory of Painting, shows Fraikin's affinity with Rococo sculpture, particularly its prevalence of putti. Compare the figure in the present group to a putto in Le Triomphe de Bacchus in the Musées Royaux in Brussels (van Lennep, op. cit. p. 177), which is very similar in pose, as well as the caps both putti are wearing. See also a slightly different version of the present composition, published in Engelen and Marx, op. cit., p. 728. The present playful marble was exhibited by Fraikin at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878, listed as L'artiste (op. cit. no. 41).

RELATED LITERATURE
J. van Lennep, Catalogue de la Sculpture, Artistes nés entre 1750 et 1882, cat. Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, 1992; C. Engelen and M. Marx, Beeldhouwkunst in België vanaf 1830, Brussels, 2002, vol. II. p. 726-33