Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier

Private collection, France

Overall the condition of the bust is very good with minor dirt and wear to the surface consistent with age. There is some minor naturally occurring oxidation to the silvered surface in areas (where the silver has darkened slightly). The silvered surface has thinned slightly in a few areas revealing the warmish bronze colour underneath, such as at the back of the neck under the turban. There is minor dark spotting and minor marks to the bronze, in particular some dark marks to the back of the neck. There are some small nicks and scratches including to the proper right shoulder. There is a small slightly visible original plug to the proper left side of the nose. There is minor wear to the marble socle, including some small chips to the bottom edge. It is possible that the marble socle could be associated.
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The present, beautifully cast, silvered bronze is a reduced version of the full size bust which measured 90cm. The location of the prime version is unknown, but it is believed to have also been silvered bronze, and appears in a photograph of Cordier's stand at the 1867 Exposition universelle (L. de Margerie, op. cit., pp. 80-81).

Charles Cordier 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. He travelled to Algeria in 1856, where he modelled his famous Mauresque d’Alger chantant (Moorish Woman of Algiers Singing) and to Egypt in 1866, where he conceived the present, highly celebrated model, Cheik Arabe du Caire (Arab Sheik of Cairo). 

RELATED LITERATURE
L. de Margerie and É. Papet, Facing the Other. Charles Cordier. Ethnographic Sculptor, exh. cat. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Québec City, and Dahesh Museum of Art, New York, 2004, pp. 80-81, 154-155, nos. 85-97