AIMÉ JULES DALOU
French, 1838-1902
Study for the Monument to Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
Signed DALOU/ cire perdue; and inscribed Susse Fres Edts Paris
Bronze, dark brown patina
Height: 11¼ inches (28.6 cm)
Executed circa 1892, this bronze is a reduction of Dalou’s monument to Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) made for the Grand Amphitheater of the New Sorbonne. It is one of a series of statues honoring French intellectuals who were to be portrayed seated in niches in the Amphitheater. Dalou received the commission for the stone figure in 1886. In 1890 he exhibited a plaster model of Lavoisier at the Paris Salon. Two years later he received permission to have reductions of it cast (one of only three works Dalou allowed to have cast in bronze editions during his lifetime) and one of these statuettes was exhibited at the Salon of 1901. The contemplative pose of this work evokes works by earlier Romantic sculptors and may be compared with Auguste Rodin’s contemporaneous Thinker.
Antoine Lavoisier was a French nobleman central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and is often referred to as the father of modern chemistry. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences at the age of twenty-six and was executed during the French Revolution. A portrait of Lavoisier and his wife Marie-Anne, painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1788, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
$7,500