Alfred Boucher

This beautiful marble is an important and rare complete version of Alfred Boucher's Volubilis one of the artist's best known and most celebrated models. Piette records that several examples were executed by the sculpture in marble, each different, some carved in high relief, others in the round, and with differences in shape and background. The present model is arguably close in shape and details to the marble exhibited by Boucher at the Paris salon of 1896 (which is illustrated by Piette, op. cit., no. A.38-5). The present marble is particularly beautifully executed both in the details such as the wooded background, and in the serene elegance of the young woman who gently holds a volubilis flower in her hand.

The genesis of Volubilis lies in a figure Boucher produced circa 1894 for the tomb of the bronze founder Ferdinand Barbedienne (1810-1892), in the cemetery of Père Lachaise. The sculptor presented a marble version of the model under the title Volubilis in the Salon des Champs-Elysées of 1896, and another example was exhibited in the Salon of 1897 under the title Aux champs. Boucher went on to carve numerous versions of the model in full figure, three quarter figure, and bust form, as well as a version with just the young woman's head. The success of the model can be explained by the way that, in many versions the girl emerges from the rock, recalling works by Rodin and Michelangelo.

Boucher's model was inspired by a poem by René François Sully Prud'homme (1839-1907), which discusses the volubilis, a flower. In Boucher's model, like a flower unfurling its petals, the girl emerges from the roughly-hewn rock. 

RELATED LITERATURE
J. Piette, Alfred Boucher 1850-1934 "sculpteur – humaniste", exh. cat. Musée Paul Dubois – Alfred Boucher, Nogent-sur-Seine, 2000, pp. 50-51, nos. 45; J. Piette, Alfred Boucher 1850-1934: L'oeuvre sculpté, catalogue raisonné, Paris, 2014, pp. 170-177, no. A38