Lot 31
  • 31

Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier

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Description

  • Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier
  • La juive d'alger and le cheik arabe de caire
  • La Juive inscribed Cordier 1869 (on the gold edging of her sash, at front lower left)

  • Bronze, copper and silver plate
  • Height: 33 7/8 in.
  • 86 cm.

Provenance

Sale, Christie’s, London, May 14, 1987, lot 62, illustrated (purchased by Edmond Safra for Republic National Bank)

Catalogue Note

Cordier first exhibited a polychrome male portrait bust at the Paris Salon of 1848.  Its female companion, Venus africaine, was subsequently shown at the 1851 London Great Exhibition, where it was purchased by Queen Victoria.  This marked the official recognition and approval of the new “exotic” sculpture versus those drawn from Antique examples.  “The love of luxury which characterizes the Second Empire created an excellent climate for polychrome sculpture.  An artist like Cordier was assured of high-ranking patrons… The sculptor participated in all of the era’s most influential decorative projects:  the Paris Opéra, the Rothschilds’ Château de Ferrières and the Hôtel de la Païva on the Champs Elysées.” (Andreas Blüm, The Color of Sculpture: 1840-1910, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 39)  Moreover, the Orientalist flavor of Cordier’s work followed a trend set by artists like Delacroix, who ultimately favored color over line.  While other examples of Cordier’s busts were formed with bronze face and headdress on an onyx or porphyry bust, this cast presents an equally impressive juxtaposition of rich patinated metals with an emphatic use of lustrous enamels.

Cordier would explore this relationship between sculpture form and decoration in approximately fifty busts.  Many  were the result of a commission for the new ethnographic gallery planned for the Musée d’Historie Naturelle in Paris.  As such, Cordier’s work represents a unique attempt to combine science and art in the form of ethnographic sculpture.  As he explained himself in the Bulletin de la Société d’Anthropolgie de Paris, he set out to produce “a general type combining all the beauties specific to the race under study.”   With this doctrine in mind, La juive d’Alger was conceived during Cordier’s second stay in Algeria, and an example was exhibited at the International Exhibition in 1862 in London, as well as at the Paris Salon of 1863.  It was not until 1869 that La juive d’Alger was shown together with the Cheik arabe de Caire.  Since this exhibition, the two portrait busts, in several variations, have often been exhibited and sold as a pair.  Together the works have come to epitomize Cordier’s romantic vision of a colorful Orient melded with the emerging technologies of sculpture and a renewed interest in the contrast of colors and textures.