Aimé-Jules Dalou 1838-1902 La Brodeuse 1875

This bronze is taken from a sketch model for Dalou's Brodeuse which he exhibited at life-size in plaster at the Salon of 1870.  He exhibited it again in bronze at the Royal Academy in 1873 and for a third time at the Philidelphia Universal Exposition in 1876.  Hunisak considered the Brodeuse to be seminal in Dalou's oeuvre for raising a genre subject to monumental sculpture.  There was much contemporary criticism of the the life-size model being carved in the immortal material of marble.

The composition is full of beautifully observed informal detail.  As Hunisak noted, perhaps the most charming motif 'is the sense of tension created by her hands, which implies the presence of a non-existent thread.'  Gautier, a contemporary critic, wrote that she possessed '...in the naïveté of her attitude, in the straightforwardness of her features, in the purity of her forms, a penetrating attractiveness.'

A plaster version of this sketch is in the Petit Palais, Paris.