Medardo Rosso

Sara Sordi, Lodi (a gift from the artist)

Sordi Family, Lodi (by descent from the above)

Private Collection, Italy (a gift from the above in 1927)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso, Milan, 1950, no. 32 & 33, illustration of another model

Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso, New York, 1963, the series discussed pp. 36-38

Paola Mola & Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso. Catalogo ragionato della scultura, Milan, 2009, nos. I.27e to I.27t, illustration of other models

The present work is a fine example of the many enfant portrayals that Rosso created over the course of his artistic career. It is a subject matter that he revisited vigorously, particularly during his time spent in Paris in the early 1890s. Rosso returned to Paris in 1889, after spending four years in Milan, deprived of recognition and success. He was hospitalised in the same year, but it was the following five-year period after his hospitalisation that he conceived and experimented continuously his series of children. Enfant Juif, conceived in 1893, is amongst them.

Rosso’s sympathy towards children is undoubtedly manifested in this wax sculpture. Underneath the plump features, a muted sense of melancholy seeps through the soft grin of the child. The subtle pupils roughly modelled are almost peering cautiously out and upwards, evoking a remarkable sense of liveliness beneath the youthful curiosity.  Such vulnerability is vividly captured by Rosso’s deliberate choice of wax as a sculptural medium. This specific medium was considered a novelty during the nineteenth century as wax models had long been used as transitory medium for bronze casting and were rarely presented as works of art in their own right. Rosso denied such tradition and transformed it into a major part of his modus operandi. He rejected completing his sculptures in round and persisted in creating coarse unrefined surfaces often leaving signs of casting still intact. This is exemplified by Enfant Juif, with the modelled surface of the child’s expression gradually morphing into an undulating wax landscape of dents and ridges that suggest the form of the child’s head and back. It is as if the wax remains malleable and is still in the midst of an on-going process of artistic creation. As Harry Cooper writes, ‘…insisting on the instantaneous impression, [Rosso] made objects our eyes have to crawl over. Insisting on frontality he left his hands wander over the backs of his sculptures to produce densities and opacities of material that even Rodin never dreamt of. These backs are where Rosso’s absorptive desires and the self-figural impulses of his medium issued’ (H. Cooper, ‘Ecce Rosso!’, in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions (exhibition catalogue), Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 2003-04, p. 21). Rosso has effectively utilised wax’s fluid physical property to materialise the fleeting movement of a child’s expression as well focusing on the ephemeral nature of childhood. As a result, Enfant Juif not only demonstrates Rosso’s virtuosity in harnessing the materiality from this sculptural medium but also reflects his interest in transience and motion, a testimony of the artist overturning traditional sculptural principles.

The identity of the portrayed child remains ambiguous and Enfant Juif was the first title used for this model. It was later speculated the young child to be Oscar Ruben Rothschild before Rosso published photographs of the sculpture under a more general title of Head of Child and subsequently as San Luigi in an exhibition of religious art in 1926. Regardless of the identity of the sitter, Sharon Hecker has pointed out that examples of Enfant Juif were repeatedly given out as gifts to friends, collectors, and patrons highlighting the work’s ‘singular importance for Rosso’ (S. Hecker, ibid., p.45). The first owner of this work, Sara Sordi (nèe Buzzi), was a great supporter of the arts and of young Italian artists of the time.