“Beauty is not the preserve of a privileged race, I have put forward the idea of ubiquity in the artistic world”
extract from a speech given in 1862 by Charles Cordier to the Anthropological Society.
Chef-modèle in bronze with brown patina.
Total H. with the piedouche: 48 cm. (19 in.)
H. of the circular and moulded piedouche in blackened wood: 14 cm. (5 ½ in.).
PROVENANCE: the artist’s family by descent.
RELATED WORKS at the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris: Charles Cordier, Arab of El Aghouat, 1856, bronze bust, H. 56 cm, Paris, Musée de l’Homme (inv. 27045-1977-201); Charles Cordier, Arab of El Aghouat, 1856, bronze and marble-onyx bust, H. 72.2 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay (inv. RF 3598).
LITERATURE: L’œuvre de M. Cordier, galerie anthropologique et ethnographique pour servir à l’histoire des races […] catalogue descriptif par Marc Trapadoux, Paris, 1860, p. 9-10, cat. n° 1; Anne Pingeot, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain and Laure de Margerie, Musée d’Orsay. Catalogue sommaire illustré des sculptures, Paris, 1986, p.102; Laure de Margerie and Edouard Papet, “Charles Cordier (1827-1905), sculpteur, l’autre et l’ailleurs”, 48/14 La revue du Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004, p. 8-11; Laure de Margerie, Edouard Papet, Christine Barthe, Jeannine Durand-Révillon and Maria Vigli, Charles Cordier, 1827-1905: l’autre et l’ailleurs, catalogue of the exhibition successively presented in Paris, at the Musée d’Orsay, from 2nd February to 2nd May 2004, in Quebec City, at the Musée national des Beaux-arts, from 10th June to 6th September 2004, in New York, at the Dahesh museum of Art, from 12th October 2004 to 9th January 2005, Paris, 2004 p. 146-148, cat. nos 16 to 30; Nadège Horner, “Répertoire sommaire des sculptures polychromes de la 2e moitié du XIXe siècle conservées dans les collections publiques françaises”, En couleurs, la sculpture polychrome en France, 1850-1910, Paris, 2018, p.197.
“The regularity and fineness of the features, the boldness and nobility of the lines, the harmonious and elegant whole presented by the physiognomy [of our head] are evidence of a privileged nature. The Arab type is indeed one of the most beautiful of the Caucasian race, and it is in the tribe of El-Aghouat that it takes on its most aristocratic character. In the individuals of this tribe, who are almost all alike, there is something of the grandeur and mysteriousness of the Assyrian figures. This type has retained all of their primitive severity and majesty. What it may have lost in magnitude, it has regained in expression. The intellectual signs are more pronounced. Less profound it is true, less imposing, Arab nature is more refined; it is closer to the ideal that we are given to conceive; the immobile sphinx has come to life and has allowed man to be seen. To preserve these transitions, to reproduce these nuances without altering the whole, is for the sculptor a rather arduous task, but the difficulty is further complicated by the extreme reluctance shown by the sectarians of Mohammed to pose, for the prophet forbids the reproduction of any human figure that carries a shadow. However much care the Arabs take to shroud their superstitions in polished forms, my model did not succeed in disguising the emotions that stirred him during the sitting which he had finally begun to consent to. No sooner had I finished my sketch, than he felt inwardly tormented by the vengeance of the evil spirit. I saw him turn pale, he rose abruptly and fled […]”, Charles Cordier, 1860.
The sculptor made this famous portrait, known as the Arab of El Aghouat, during his second stay in Algeria between April and October 1856, and on his return to Paris executed the bronze master-model (chef-modèle) of this head presented here. The work, which is imbued with a stunning verism, displays an irreproachable quality of casting and patina. It was very carefully cold chiselled, as closely as possible to the original mould, in order to be used as a model for subsequent editions. A chef-modèle is always intended to be perfect in every respect, which is why it is never intended to be sold, remaining the exclusive property of its creator. Here, it displays a form of naturalism that unfailingly supports the artist’s anthropological and ethnographic intentions, and gives us the exceptional opportunity to see this work completely “naked”, which Cordier would later systematically cover with burnous and other draperies in Algerian marble-onyx and polychrome marbles.
This master-model was photographed in 1857 in Cordier’s workshop by Charles Marville (1813-1879). This print on albumen paper from a glass negative entitled “Arab of El Aghouat, Syrian-Arab family, sculpture by Charles Cordier (frontal view)”, taken from an album that Marville made for the private use of the sculptor, was until now the only visual document of this master model of which all trace had been lost. Acquired by the State in 1859, this precious photographic album is now kept in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (inv. PHO 1991 16 2 1). Our master-model has actually remained in the artist’s family by descent up to the present day. It therefore constitutes a major rediscovery, and a genuine milestone, in Cordier’s work.
It was used in particular for the bronze bust of the Arab of El Aghouat that the sculptor exhibited, among a gallery composed of twelve busts of “Algerian types”, at the Salon des artistes vivants, which was held at the Palais des Champs-Elysées in Paris, on 15th June 1857 (cat. n° 2812), as well as the bust of the same model but covered with a burnous treated in marble-onyx, also presented in 1857 (cat. n° 2819) and photographed by Charles Marville in the artist’s workshop. The bust was also shown at the Exposition des produits de l’Algérie in Paris at the Palais de l’Industrie in 1860. It was acquired by the State in 1857 or 1860 and sent to the Château de Saint-Cloud. It was exhibited at the Musée du Luxembourg in 1870 and can now be seen at the Musée d’Orsay (inv. RF 3598). Cordier described this bust masterfully in the catalogue of his work prefaced by Marc Trapadoux: L’œuvre de M. Cordier, galerie anthropologique et ethnographique pour servir à l’histoire des races […]. In the reference catalogue raisonné published for the exhibition Charles Cordier, 1827-1905: l’autre et l’ailleurs, successively presented in 2004-2005 in Paris, Quebec City and New York, Jeannine Durand-Révillon and Laure de Margerie listed a total of eleven editions of the Arab of El Aghouat, in addition to our master-model – whose photograph of the Musée d’Orsay appears as n° 28 in the catalogue. These works are all different and dressed in onyx, marble and porphyry. Cordier regularly paired his bust of the Arab of El Aghouat with that of the “Negro of Sudan” in the course of his exhibitions, sometimes adding his bust of a “Chinaman”.
Charles Cordier
or the importance of representing the diversity of human physiognomies
In 1847, Charles Cordier met Seïd Enkess, known as Saïd Abdallah, a former freed Sudanese slave who posed as a professional model in several Parisian workshops, including that of François Rude (1784-1855), in which he had been trained. He was immediately struck by the man’s handsomeness, asked him to pose for him, and completed his bust in only a fortnight. “A superb Sudanese showed up in the workshop. I made this bust in fifteen days. A friend and I took it to my room near my bed […] I made a cast of it […] and sent it to the Salon […]. It was a revelation for the whole art world. […]”, Mémoires of Charles Cordier. Cordier presented this bust a few months later at the Salon des artistes français under the title of “Saïd Abdallah, from the tribe of Mayac, kingdom of Darfur”. He subsequently executed several versions of this bust, and presented one of them in London, alongside an edition of the Nubian Woman, at the 1851 International Exhibition. Queen Victoria acquired a copy, as did the French state, which destined it for the new anthropology gallery of the Museum of Natural History in Paris.
This meeting with Seïd Enkess was of capital importance in his career and convinced him of the importance of representing the diversity of human physiognomies. Slavery had just been abolished in the French colonies (law of 27th April 1848 decreed by the Second Republic), and the young sculptor decided to give free rein to his sympathy for the abolitionist theories and to his curiosity for the diversity of the world. The latter was still very poorly known in a Europe that was in the midst of the expansion of its colonial empires, sending its explorers further and further afield to Africa and around the world, and enthralled by the numerous travel accounts that they published when they returned from their expeditions.
Thanks to a government grant, Cordier was sent to Algeria in 1856 where he executed many portraits, and it was under the title of “Arab of El Aghouat” that he presented the bronze bust made from our chief model at the Salon in 1857.
In 1861, now considered a true pioneer of ethnography as a subject for sculpture, he produced, with the same finesse of execution and even adding enamel to the lavishness of his polychrome effects, the bust of the “Woman from the Colonies”, known at the time as the “Câpresse from the colonies”, which he would henceforth regularly present as a ‘pendant’ to the Man from Sudan, which, as previously mentioned, was regularly associated with our bust. According to the tradition of the sculptor’s family, the woman who posed for him in 1861 was allegedly the same who lent her features, a few years later, to the chisels of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, for his magnificent figure of Africa sculpted circa 1868 for his fountain of the Four Parts of the World Supporting the Celestial Sphere which today adorns the garden of the Observatory in Paris. With this bust, a copy of which, the one in the Musée d’Orsay, was acquired by Napoleon III in 1861, Cordier pursued the task he had set himself of “fixing the different human types that are about to merge into one and the same people”, brilliantly illustrating what he described at the time as “the idea of the universality of beauty”.
In successive exhibitions, these busts were all the more successful as the French and European publics of the time were not familiar with such ethnographic representations. Cordier was to write: “My genre had the topicality of a new subject, the revolt against slavery, anthropology at its birth”. Numerous ethnographic busts such as the Arab ofEl Aghouat, the Kabyle Child, the Black Moorish Woman, or the Mulattress, Priestess at the Feast of the Beans, were clearly described by the sculptor as portraits of individuals he met during his missions, which he carried out in Algeria (1856), but also in Cairo (1866-1868) or in the islands of the Cyclades archipelago in Greece (1858). He also executed portraits of historical figures, such as those of the Hydriot Woman, a retrospective representation of Laskarina Baboulina, the heroine of Greek independence, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Marshal Randon, governor of Algiers (1856), or the explorer Savorgnan de Brazza in 1904.
Cordier refused to use life casts, which in his opinion “distorts the flesh” and “dulls physiognomies”, and it was through observation and synthesis that he intended to express the truth and beauty of the “types” he encountered during his travels.
A member of the Anthropological Society, he showed a genuine scientific ambition in his work, going so far as to give the title, as we have seen, of Galerie anthropologique et ethnographique to the catalogue of his works that he presented at the l’Exposition des produits de l’Algérie at the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris from July 1860. But what he sought above all through these magnificent busts was beauty, in the sense that “beauty is not the preserve of a privileged race”, thus adopting an approach that was, to say the least, very audacious in the eyes of his contemporaries. He wrote in 1862: “Beauty is not the preserve of a privileged race; I have put forward in the artistic world the idea of the ubiquity of beauty. Every race has its beauty which differs from that of other races. The most beautiful Negro is not the one who most resembles us, nor is it the one who presents in the most pronounced degree the characters which distinguish his race from ours. It is he who combines in himself forms, features and a physiognomy in which the essential moral and intellectual characteristics of the Ethiopian race are reflected in a harmonious balance.” In a letter addressed three years later to the Count of Nieuwerkerke, Director of the Imperial Museums and Superintendent of the Fine Arts, he would add, as an echo to the “beauty” of the bust presented here: “I want to give you the race as it is in its relative beauty, in its absolute truth, with its passions, its fatalism, its proud calm, its fallen greatness, but whose very principle has remained since Antiquity […]”.
A major figure in French sculpture under the Second Empire, totally in line with the great movements for the defence of freedoms that arose in the middle of the 19th century, Charles Cordier knew, like no other sculptor before him, how to magnify, through the great singularity of his talent and the triumph of his lavish polychromy, this ideal of beauty seen through the sole prism of “respect for the other”.
Charles Cordier, short biographical note
Born in Cambrai, Charles Cordier was the son of Charles Antoine Cordier (1788-1867), a pharmacist, and Mélanie Derome (1787-1866). He had a brother, Eugène (1820-1865), and a sister, Mélanie Cordier, who married the engraver Firmin Gillot (1820-1872). Cordier practised modelling in Lille, in the workshop of the sculptor Louis Victor Bougron (1798-1886), whom he followed to Paris in 1844. He made a living from small-scale sculpting and attended evening classes at the Royal School of Drawing run by Jean Hilaire Belloc (1786-1866). In 1846, he joined the workshop of Rude (1784-1855), where his meeting with Seïd Enkess marked the starting point of his ethnographic work, which would not only bring together non-Western types, but also numerous European types, such as the Roman woman of Transtevere or the Young Girl from the Morvan, a Gallic type, or the Type of Woman from the Paris Surroundings, thus completing his great project of representing human diversity.
In July 1851 he married Félicie Berchère, the granddaughter of Florimond Duméril known as Montfleury (the elder), brother of André Marie Constant Duméril. Félicie Cordier was one of the forty or so people invited to the wedding reception of Caroline Duméril and Charles Mertzdorff in Paris (June 1858), together with her sister Marie and her husband Giuseppe Devers.
A deeply generous man, he devoted his art to advocating respect for others in their uniqueness. Several of his ethnographic busts were symbolically acquired in 1858 by the city of Le Havre, from where thousands of black men and women had left for slavery in the 18th century alone.
In addition to his first vocation, Cordier also took part in the great public and private projects of the Second Empire, thereby multiplying and diversifying his production. Constant Say, for instance, had Moses saved from the waters, a marble by Cordier, in his private mansion on the Place Vendôme, and had a portrait of his wife executed by him in 1865. Charles Cordier left Paris at the end of the 1860s to settle in Nice, and from 1890 onwards he went to Algiers where he spent the rest of his life. He was buried in Paris, in the Montmartre cemetery.
It was Marc Trapadoux who best defined the life and purpose of Charles Cordier well before his death (1860):
“The life of M. Cordier will have been, in the noblest and most rigorous sense of the word, a voyage in the discovery of form! For several years now he has been obstinately pursuing the problem, grasping human nature in all the varieties of conformation, in all the evolutions of the line, in all its combinations, in all its whims, in all its movements, in all its aspects, in all its settings. Many are the needs catered for by studies undertaken under the influence of a similar method; for it is not only to artists, but also to the anthropologist, the ethnographer, the anatomist, the philosopher and the historian, that M. Cordier’s works are addressed. Thus understood, art is no longer a mere individual episode, a pure fantasy; it takes on its true purpose by attaching itself to the great movement of humanity. If it is true that the faithful reproduction of the types of the various races is necessary to enlighten the study of biological and moral sciences, and to provide them with solid foundations, sculpture has never had a more profound meaning, never has it been of more general interest.”
