Joan Of Arc On Horseback - Emmanuel Fremiet (1824-1910)

Equestrian group in bronze with silver patinasigned "Fremiet" on the basecast by "F. Barbedienne Fondeur Paris" (founder's mark) in very good conditionSimilar model reproduced in "Emmanuel Fremiet - The hand and the multiple", Exhibition at the Museums of Fine Arts of Dijon and Grenoble, 1988, page 127, n°S.243.Biography:Emmanuel Fremiet (1824-1910) was the nephew and student of the sculptor François Rude. Alongside his monumental works commissioned by the State, he was recognized as an excellent realistic animal sculptor. Emmanuel Fremiet devoted himself mainly to equestrian statues. He began as a scientific lithographer (osteology) and worked in the studio of the painters of the morgue. In 1843, he sent a study of a gazelle to the Salon, the prelude to a prolific production. His Wounded Bear and Wounded Dog were acquired by the State for the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 1850. During the 1850s, Fremiet produced works on the theme of Napoleon III. He exhibited bronzes representing Napoleon III's basset hounds, Ravageot and Ravagode, at the Salon of 1853. From 1855 to 1859, he executed a series of statuettes on military subjects for the emperor. He created the Monument to Napoleon I in 1868 and that of Louis d'Orléans in 1869 (Château de Pierrefonds). In 1874, Emmanuel Fremiet designed the first equestrian Monument to Joan of Arc, erected in the Place des Pyramides in Paris, which he replaced following criticism of the proportions with another version in 1900. During this period, he also executed Pan and the Cubs (Paris, Musée d'Orsay). At the end of the 19th century, a fashionable theme inspired Fremiet and other artists: the confrontation between Man and Beast. A news item reported by the newspaper Le Temps recounted that in a Gabonese village, a stray and furious gorilla had allegedly kidnapped and molested a woman after destroying huts in 1880. Furthermore, the accounts of explorers like Alfred Russel Wallace filled newspapers with articles and engravings illustrating the attack of a Malaysian tracker by an orangutan. This theme inspired several major works by Fremiet. The Gorilla Abducting a Negress was initially rejected at the 1859 Salon, then presented behind a curtain. A new version, Gorilla Abducting a Woman, received a medal of honor at the Salon of the Society of French Artists in 1887, of which he was a member until 1908. This work, famous in its time, nevertheless caused a scandal because it depicts a gorilla abducting a naked woman, allegedly with the intention of raping her, which aroused public curiosity. In the same vein and even more remarkable is Orangutan Strangling a Bornean Savage (1895), a commission from the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, inspired by Wallace's stories, reported with considerable exaggeration by The Times. This time the animal is a male, and in strangling the "savage," he performs an act as impossible, physically and ethologically, as the rape of a woman by a gorilla. But art works, and generations of visitors to the Museum gallery where it is exhibited have been horrified by the force emanating from the work. In 1893, Fremiet created the Monument to Velázquez for the garden of the Colonnade of the Louvre Palace in Paris and, in 1897, the statue of Saint Michael slaying the dragon for the spire of the abbey church of Mont Saint-Michel. Fremiet was elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1892 and succeeded Antoine-Louis Barye as professor of animal drawing at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris. He was a member of the Société des artistes français until 1908.