Albert Ernest Carrier-Belleuse
1824 – Anizi-le-Château -
Sèvres - 1887
with base 68.5 cm, 27 inches
Note:
Properly Carrier de Belleuse,
Albert Ernest became a pupil of David d’Angers in 1840 at the Ecole des Beaux
Arts in Paris. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1851 with two bronze medals
but did not exhibit again until 1857; thereafter he showed every year until his
death. The June Revolution had
forced him to leave Paris and he went first to London, and from there to
Staffordshire, where he worked for five years for Herbert Minton at the factory
in Stoke upon Trent, returning to Paris in 1855.
Success and fame followed the exhibition of Death of General Desaix at
the Salon of 1859, and after that he was much patronised by the court, and by
the Emperor Napoleon III.
Carrier-Belleuse was an innovator
who not only pioneered new treatments of traditional themes, but also developed
traditional methods and techniques for the production of sculpture.
He was one of the first sculptors to organise public sales of his works
at auction, mostly at Hôtel Drouot in Paris, but also in Brussels and London.
Catalogues for sixteen sales are known and documented but there may well
have been more, for which the records have not survived.
Iconographical Note:
The
subject is sometimes given as ‘Amazone’ which in French (from the Greek)
means a female warrior. This is
fair enough in some ways but she is clearly chained to the rock and thus in some
ways comes closer to the figure of Andromeda. However, this cannot be either,
since she rests her foot on a helmet, a shield behind her, not attributes of
Andromeda; but there is no indication that these trophies actually belonged to
her. On the contrary, her
relaxed, attentive, almost anticipatory stance has nothing in common with what
would be expected of a defeated prisoner of war. Rather she may be a camp
follower or slave girl, a trophy herself, fully expecting to be well treated,
her beauty a sufficient passport to whatever the next phase of life’s fortune
may bring her. The chain, which
rather nominally holds her, seems merely to emphasise the Third Empire (and
Victorian) excuse for depicting an extremely attractive nude and attaching the
vestige of a story to it, in order to enhance its acceptability, to make it more
respectable.
It has been suggested that Carrier
created this model specifically for his 1868 sale. Hargrove
notes that in this model he transformed his eclectic sources into a thoroughly
nineteenth-century configuration. The arrangement of the figure approximates
Pajou’s Psyche but the Amazone is more boldly sensual than Psyche.
Carrier Belleuse added a mannered lushness to Pajou’s idea’