Jeune faune

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was an eminent romantic sculptor who produced numerous busts in a spontaneous and realistic style, expressing a variety of emotions. This young fawn with its gentle smile is reminiscent of his youthful masterpiece, Le Pêcheur à la coquille, created in 1858. The mythological creature, seated on a tree stump, is depicted playing with a cat, while holding a bird in its left hand. The piece was originally titled La Proie, or The Prey. Apparently, only a very few copies of this sculpture by Carpeaux were ever made.
More than twenty years after the master’s death, this work by Arthur Pierre was produced in 1896 to adorn the Monte-Carlo Pigeon Shooting Gallery created by Société des Bains de Mer. The statue was placed on the building’s roof in the manner of an antefix, forming a sort of finial. The sculpture is a registered model owned by the foundries of Les Hauts Fourneaux & Ateliers de Construction de Tusey, in the Meuse, north-eastern France.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was born in Valenciennes in 1827. World famous for his sculptures of allegorical subjects, groups, figures, busts, portraits, and bas-reliefs, he was a painter, engraver, and drawing artist. In 1844, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts where he was a pupil of François Rude, before spending four years at the Villa Médicis. On his return to Paris in 1862, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s fame rose to new heights and he received a string of commissions. He was appointed the official sculptor of Napoleon III and was responsible for the artistic education of the Imperial Prince. He died in 1875 in Courbevoie.
Arthur Pierre, born on 30 July in Antwerp, studied at the Academies of Fine Art of Termonde and Antwerp. A member of the “Als Ik Kan”, he created war memorials and funerary statues. He died in 1938.