Emmanuel Fremiet French, 1824-1910

Bartlett vol.XXXI, pp.102-103; de Biez pp.30; Chatrousse, L’Artiste, September 1862; Chevillot, pp.75-76, no.S24

Tous les amateurs de la race féline voudrant avoir ce chef-d’oeuvre d’observation et de naturel.  (L’Illustration, 1849, p.414)

The exhibition debut of Chat et ses petits at the 1849 Paris Salon in plaster was Fremiet’s first great sculptural coup. Then aged twenty-five, over the previous five years he had shown only six modest works.  The assessment of the critic for L’Illustration magazine quoted above reflects the wide popular acclaim this work received on its first public exhibition.  Encouraged by this success Fremiet sent his Chat et ses petits to numerous shows: first in marble at the 1850 Salon, then to the Exposition Universelle in 1855, to the Exposition Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, 1861, and to the International Exhibition in London, 1862; then in bronze to the International Exhibition in Vienna, 1873, the Paris Salon in 1880, the International Exhibition in Antwerp, 1885 and finally to the International Exhibition in Munich in 1888.

Coupled with the critical applause also came official state recognition when, on 6 October 1849, Fremiet was commissioned by the state to carve Chat et ses petits in marble for the price of 2,000 frances. The cost of the marble was covered by the government and documents record that this was a block of white Carrara marble costing 500 francs.  This state commissioned marble was placed in the Tuileries apartments of General Valliant, Marshal of France and housekeeper to Napoleon III.  T.H. Bartlett records, in his series of articles on Fremiet in 1891, a meeting between the sculptor and General Valliant one day when the General observed: ‘O, I have one of your things, the cat and her young. It pleases my children, and they like to play with it’.  It is also Bartlett who in the same article made probably the first claim that this prime marble version was burnt in the Tuileries fire of 1871.  This contention was repeated by Chevillot in 1988.  However, it is clear that the marble commissioned by the state was one and the same as that sent to the International exhibition because the Imperial Government is listed as the lender in the London 1862 catalogue, so there is every reason to suppose that Fremiet only made one example in marble.  The appearance of the present extremely fine marble finally proves that Fremiet’s first great marble animalier composition was not destroyed in 1871.

As the original and unique Salon marble of Fremiet’s first important animalier group, and his first state commission the present marble is a highly significant rediscovery and addition to the existing Fremiet corpus. Bartlett considered Chat et ses petits as ‘long since regarded as one of the most charming things he ever made: a little masterpiece’.  For Jacques de Biez, who published a biography on Fremiet in 1910, the group was a landmark in animalier sculpture: ‘Personne jusque là n’avait su rendre tout ce qu’il y a de velouté, de perfide et d’assoupil dans le chat’.  Chatrousse’s review of the 1862 International Exhibition amuzingly remembered the irresistible appeal of this group to an English audience ‘les jeunes ladies s’épanouissent devant l’angora de notre spiritual artiste … c’est depuis trios jours la seule sculpture que j’ai vu regarder’.