Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1807 - 1852)

Collection Pierre-Louis Calatayud

Satan by Jean-Jacques Feuchère is an iconic work of French Romanticism at its height. Feuchère, son of the bronze maker and finisher Jacques-François Feuchère, was trained by the sculptors Cortot and Ramey.

The present model was originally designed as a part of a mantelpiece decoration, with Satan positioned at the centre flanked by two vases in the shape of bats. The plaster model was exhibited at the 1834 Salon, as well as a small bronze version the following year. Satanic subjects were popular among the Romantic artists of the 1830s, who felt inspired by literary works such as Dante’s Inferno (1303-1321), Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Goethe’s Faust (1808). Feuchère portrays Satan as a fallen angel, expelled from heaven, with his wings wrapped around him, which seems broadly derived from Dürer’s Melancholy (circa 1514).

RELATED LITERATURE

P. Fusco, H.W. Janson, The Romantics to Rodin. French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from North Americain collections, exh. cat. Los Angeles County Museum, 1980, pp. 266-267;

S. Lami, Dictionnaire des Sculpteurs de l’Ecole Française au Dix-Neuvième siècle, Paris, 1916 (réed. 1970), p. 364-369;

L'Invention du Sentiment aux sources du Romantisme, exh. cat., Paris, musée de la Musique, 2002.

W. Joseph, "Images de Satan entre ange déchu et créature fantastique", in Visages de l'effroi. Violence et fantastique de David à Delacroix, exh. cat. Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris, 2016, pp.184 -193.