withrevolutionarycries:

shiiiiiiit this is dope. who made it? what did they say about it? how has it been received? i want to write a paper on this so i can sit and contemplate it for hours and find out all about it.

The piece is made of bronze and onyx.

The artist is Charles Henri Joseph Cordier, a French sculptor who apparently focused on sculpting Africans.

Cordier was related by marriage to the director of the Museum of Natural History in Paris and served from 1851 to 1866 as its official ethnographic sculptor, creating a series of busts for the museum’s new ethnographic gallery. In 1856 he was awarded a commission from the French government to visit Algeria with the purpose of studying and reproducing in sculpture “the different indigenous types of the human race.” Upon his return he exhibited ten busts at the Paris Salon of 1857.

In his unpublished memoirs Charles Cordier cites the law of April 27, 1848 that abolished slavery in France and its colonies, writing: “My art incorporated the reality of a whole new subject, the revolt against slavery and the birth of anthropology.” In pioneering ethnography as a subject for sculpture in the nineteenth century, Cordier aimed to illustrate what he described as “the idea of the universality of beauty.” His busts often paired couples of the opposite sex but of the same race. This rare instance of matched busts of women was desired by the purchaser, a gaming club in Marseilles, that also commissioned the sumptuous Second-Empire pedestals from Cordier.



The busts revel in the period taste for polychromy in sculpture, an international phenomenon sparked by artistic debates about the painting of ancient statuary and inspired by ancient Roman and Renaissance sculpture composed of variously colored marbles. On a trip to Algeria in 1856 Cordier discovered onyx deposits in recently reopened ancient quarries and began to use the stone in busts such as these. He ingeniously fitted enameled bronze heads into the vibrantly patterned stone, creating exciting though costly representations of Africans that appealed to the highest levels of European society.