Denys Puech

Sotheby's New York, 16 December 2015, lot 78;

Where acquired by the present collector.

Denys Puech moved from Aveyron to Paris in 1872 and began working as an apprentice in the workshop of François Jouffroy while taking evening classes at the École des Beaux-Arts. He won the Prix de Rome in 1884 and was given a stipend to study at the Villa Medici, where he would triumphantly return as Director in 1921. It was during his time at the Villa Medici that Puech came up with his composition for La Sirène. While living in Rome he fell in love with the Opera singer Emma Calvé and he felt that the theme of the Siren abducting a man (as opposed to depictions of men abducting women, which are much more common in the art historical cannon), expressed his own personal situation. The evocative sculpture won a medal at the Salon, and copies of the work are in the collections of both the Musée D’Orsay in Paris and the Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen. Another copy is in the Denys Puech Museum in Rodez, France which the artist, who was appointed as once of the official sculptors of the French Third Republic, founded in 1903.