by Vanessa Schmitz-Grucker
They have not left the artist’s family for over a hundred and fifty years, and we hardly dared imagine their existence: these two master models made by Charles Cordier (1827-1905) were the basis of works that are now on show in museums. Indeed, the Arab of El Aghouat, dressed in a turban and a burnoose in marble-onyx, is currently exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay. The bust of the Arab Sheikh of Cairo is rarer. The bronze models of these busts with a brown patina on their original, blackened wood pedestal, were made during two journeys, the first to Algeria in 1856 and the second to Egypt in 1866. These works were intended to be used as a standard for later replicas and are particularly important in the artist’s corpus because they had to be absolutely perfect. And they are: the casting is of irreproachable quality, and the chiseling and the patina are exemplary. Click here to read more.
