A Hellenistic Marble Torso of Aphrodite, circa 1st Century B.C.

standing with the weight on her right leg, the right arm raised.

Paris art market, prior to 1951
William Welles Bosworth (1868-1966), Villa Marietta, Vaucresson, Hauts-de-Seine, France
private collection, Spain, by descent from the above (Rouillac, Cheverny, June 9th, 2013, no. 122, illus.)

The wood stand bears the stamp of Japanese wood artist Kichizô Inagaki (1876-1951). His bases are celebrated as works of art for their own sake because each is created to fit its sculpture perfectly, sculpture and base ultimately unifying as a cohesive object. Beyond bearing the mark of such a distinguished woodworker (literally stamped with his artist name, “Yoshio”), works mounted on bases by Inagaki share the provenance of having been on the Parisian art market between 1911 and 1951. While working for Joseph Brummer, Inagaki made prestigious connections among key dealers, collectors, and avant-garde artists in early 20th century Paris and thereby gained his greatest commissions. Auguste Rodin, for example, put Inagaki in charge of creating bases for his entire collection of antiquities in 1912. Inagaki also worked closely with dealers Dikran Khan Kelekian, Charles Ratton, and Paul Guillaume, creating bases for the majority of Albert Barnes’s sculptures.

William Welles Bosworth, known as the personal architect of John D. Rockefeller Jr., was responsibile for much of the architecture at Rockefeller's Kykuit estate, as well as MIT's campus in Cambridge, Mass. Despite these and other high-profile designs, Bosworth was better known in France, where he was one of the few Americans ever to receive the Legion of Honor and the French Cross of the Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters for his restoration of Versailles and Notre-Dame de Reims, both funded by Rockefeller.

As these projects ended in 1936, Bosworth began work on the Villa Marietta in Vaucresson, remaining in France with his family and eventually becoming an associate member of the École des Beaux-Arts, where he had received his architectural training early in his career.