Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

This beautiful bust of a young Chinese man represents a high point of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's small oeuvre of ethnographic sculpture. 

Carpeaux made two versions of Le Chinois. The present model follows the first version (esquisse), which was executed in 1868 and is distinguished from the 1872 variant by its sketchier, more spontaneous modelling. Carpeaux here captures the character of his sitter and approaches the scientific mastery of Cordier's ethnic busts. Very much a product of the vogue for orientalisme, the bust was developed as part of Carpeaux's monumental group Quatre Parties du Monde, commissioned by the city of Paris in 1867 as the crowning element of the architect Davioud's Fontaine de l'Observatoire.

The esquisse model of was produced in terracotta by the artist’s atelier around 1872, and then posthumously from 1875. The Susse terracotta edition dates between 1920 and 1939.

RELATED LITERATURE

M. Poletti and A. Richarme, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux sculpteur, Paris, 2003, p. 122, no. BU23