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269 - Charlotte Saint-Gervais de La Salle (c. 1860 – 1937)
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Estimate €3,000 - €5,000
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Description
Charlotte Saint-Gervais de La Salle (c. 1860 – 1937) Portrait of a woman Circa 1876 Bronze bust with brown patina Bears the 1876 salon label on the front of the pedestal, ‘No. 3594’ Total height 54 cm, on a red veined marble pedestal Height 13 cm Dust, chips and damage to one of the upper corners of the pedestal Provenance: The artist’s collection, then passed down through the family. Château in the Vendée Exhibition: Paris, Palais des Champs-Elysées, 1876, work exhibited under the title “Négresse” and number 3594 Bibliography: -Explanation of the works of painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving and lithography by living artists exhibited at the Palais des Champs-Elysées on 1 May 1876, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1876, Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts. Directorate of Fine Arts. Salon of 1876. 93rd official exhibition since the year 1673. Related literature: -La Gazette de France, 5 June 1890, pp. 2–4: statue of Vespera; -Édouard Lepage, A Page from the History of Art in the 19th Century. A Feminist Conquest: Mme Léon Bertaux, Paris, Imprimerie française J. Dangon, 1911; -Anne Rivière, Sculpture’Elles. Les sculpteurs femmes du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, Paris, Somogy, 2011; -Anne Dufour, Le modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse, Paris, Co-published by Flammarion / Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie; 2019; -Sophie Jacques, The Sculpture of Hélène Bertaux (1825–1909) and the Academic Tradition. Analysis of Three Nudes, Québec, Laval University, 2015; -Christelle Lozère, ‘Image of the “Other”. Representations of Africans and West Indians in Europe (18th–20th centuries)’, Anneaux de la mémoire, 2023; It was under the official title of “Negress” that this resolutely modern bust was exhibited for the first time at the 1876 Salon. Hard to accept at the start of the 21st century, this title given to the portrait of a young African woman with a defiant gaze and a mocking smile, dressed with quintessential Parisian elegance, must nevertheless be placed within the post-abolitionist political and historical context of the Third Republic, where racism and derogatory representations unfortunately remained widespread. Created by Charlotte de Saint-Gervais, who became the Countess de La Salle following her marriage to Georges Seguin de La Salle in 1881, this bust marks the debut at the official Salon of a young sculptor of aristocratic origin, trained in the studio of the famous Mme Léon Bertaux, a leading figure in the fight for women’s access to artistic education. From 1876 to 1898, Charlotte de Saint-Gervais regularly took part in the major Parisian Salons, where she mainly exhibited busts, thus establishing herself as a specialist in this conventional category of works. However, following the presentation of this first visionary work, the sculptor failed to make a breakthrough. There is, however, a mention of one of her works in 1890, accompanied by a highly condescending review: “Madame Charlotte de Saint-Gervais is a pupil of Mme Berteaux, who is an accomplished artist. She has submitted a statue of a nude woman which she has named ‘Vespera’, no doubt to justify the feminine gender she has attributed to the Evening. Mme de Saint-Gervais may well be unaware that ‘Vesper’ is neuter and cannot be feminine. I would even say that, from every point of view, one must congratulate a woman for being ignorant of this Latin which, in its words, defies decency. (...) The movement of this figure is well understood and welcome. We shall confine ourselves to regretting a slight heaviness in the pose and a slight stiffness in the forms of this body, which, unbeknownst to the artist, corrects her ignorance of Latin by appearing a little too much of the neuter gender. Nevertheless, this is a good start in the world of fine art, and Mme de Saint-Gervais will find encouragement in this first success. ” This shows, in this conventional context, just how revolutionary—even iconoclastic—our bust of an African woman, presented fourteen years earlier by a young artist who would have been barely sixteen (she is thought to have been born in 1860), appears. This bust depicts a young woman wearing a high turban, whose wide bands of fabric, combined with the small ruffles framing her face, establish a subtle link between ‘exotic’ headdress and Parisian elegance. The face, enlivened by a slight wry smile and a sidelong glance tinged with mocking irony, moves away from pure ethnographic typology to suggest a temperament, almost a character, in a register of restrained impertinence. The torso is enlivened by a scarf crossed around the neck, evoking the outdoor attire of the elegant Parisian women of the time. The bronze bust rests on a pedestal of veined reddish-brown marble: the combination of this luxurious base and a vigorous modelling—almost impressionistic in its treatment of folds and surfaces—anchors the work in the sculptural modernity of the 1870s. In the post-abolitionist context of the 1860s–1880s, curiosity about the Other and a desire for discovery manifested themselves in Europe in various forms, ranging from the creation, in 1859, of the Paris Anthropological Society to the exhibitions of people from the four corners of the world at the World’s Fairs. This depiction of an African woman lies at the intersection of several traditions: the still very influential tradition of ‘ethnographic’ and decorative sculpture promoted by Charles Cordier, and the more dramatic and protest-oriented tradition pioneered by Carpeaux, unveiled at the 1869 Salon under the title *Négresse* and later renamed *Pourquoi naître esclave?* However, compared to Carpeaux, Charlotte de Saint-Gervais marks a genuine iconographic turning point: she renounces the explicit attributes of slavery (ropes, violent twisting, compressed breast) and rejects any sensational eroticisation in favour of a dignified figure, concentrating expressiveness in the face and hairstyle, where both otherness and modernity are manifested. Far from being merely an anonymous ‘type’, the young African woman takes on the characteristics of a true portrait: a distinctive demeanour, self-assured elegance, an almost worldly presence, even if the title of the Salon perpetuates the racial categorisation of her time. This development echoes parallel explorations in painting. Cézanne, with *Le Noir Scipion* (c. 1866–1868), already endows his African model with an unprecedented physical and psychological depth. In *Olympia* (1863, 1865 Salon), Manet gives the African servant girl Laure a striking presence as a counterpoint to the European courtesan. In 1870, Bazille, in his *Young Woman with Peonies* (formerly titled *Negress with Peonies*), depicts an elegantly dressed black woman, set against a refined floral motif, already far removed from mere images of servitude. Even closer to our bust, Fernand Cormon’s Young Woman in Profile, known as Young African Woman (Musée d’Orsay), depicts a figure of great nobility, rendered with gravity and a keen attention to the modelling of the hair and the bust. In this context, the Black Woman No. 3594 from the 1876 Salon appears as a pivotal work in the history of the representation of Black models in the late 19th century. The work of a female sculptor from a socially engaged studio, it transposes into the medium of the academic bust the themes explored by modern painters such as Manet, Cézanne, Bazille and Cormon. It makes the figure of the Black woman a subject in her own right, marked by the racial ideology of her time yet endowed with a perceptible individuality. Through the vigour of its modelling, the sophistication of its turban-style hairstyle and the deliberate ambiguity between the ‘African type’ and Parisian elegance, this bust, from Charlotte de Saint-Gervais’s very first Salon, bears witness to the ambition of a sculptor determined to tackle a subject hitherto dominated by the great male names, approaching it with a perspective that is at once critical, worldly and profoundly humanist.
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About the sale Fine Decor, Tableware & Archaeology
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Auction time 06/23/2026 at 2:00 PM
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