Hippolyte Moreau French, 1832-1927

The Moreau dynasty were among the 19^th century’s most prolific sculptors. Its founder, Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Joseph Moreau (1797-1855) was a painter and sculptor based in Dijon, best known for the restoration work he did on the pleurants  of the tombs of the Dukes of Bourgogne. His three sons, Mathurin (1822-1912), Hippolyte (1832-1927) and Auguste-Louis-Mathurin Moreau (1834-1917) all became sculptors in their own right, renowned for their elegant and graceful genre scenes and allegories.

Hippolyte Moreau, the second son of Jean-Baptiste Moreau, is the only one who is not recorded to have first trained in his father's workshop. Instead, he went to work in Paris, where he apprenticed under the direction of François Jouffroy and started exhibiting in the Salon in 1859. His greatest works include - usually allegorical - figures of children and young women, such as the present marble. Hippolyte often used similar subjects as his younger brother Auguste.

The present marble Le Rêve was first shown at the Salon as a bronze in 1887. The young woman, shown resting on a rock, is superbly carved with an intricate eye for detail. Especially the flowing folds of drapery and the bunch of flowers held in her hands in her lap show a careful realism. The finely carved hair is held together at the back, and flows beautifully down her back, in almost parallel folds to the drapery. The young woman, lost in her daydream, gazes into the distance.

RELATED LITERATURE

La Sculpture Française au XIXe Siècle, exhib. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, 1986, cat. no. 59, p. 134;
P. Kjellberg, Bronzes of the 19th Century. Dictionary of Sculptors, Atglen, 1994, pp. 508-510