Janissary - Jean Didier Debut 1824-1893

DimensionsTotal height: approx. 32.5 cmTerrace: 11 x 8.3 cmWeight: 2920 gramsSignatureSigned on the design: D. DEBUTAttribution label: Janissary, Prix de Rome (Didier Debut won a second Prix de Rome in 1851)

This theme was rarely explored in 19th-century sculpture. Around the same time as Didier Debut's work, between 1880 and 1884, Émile Coriolan Guillemin created a Janissary of Sultan Mahmud II, while Félix Ziem, traveling in Constantinople, brought back several evocations of the city, such as the Janissary Kiosk. Although the Ottoman Empire was then in a state of decline, the Orientalist theme nonetheless evoked a sublime and idealized elsewhere, a style that was very much in vogue at the time.

With the family having settled in Paris, the young Didier entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the age of 18, in September 1842, where he studied under David d’Angers. Awarded the second prize in the Prix de Rome in 1851 with a bas-relief depicting the Greeks and Trojans fighting over the body of Patroclus, he had already been exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Français since 1848. He presented works there with great regularity until the year of his death and was awarded an honorable mention. A very humble man, Didier Debut, despite displaying "Prix de Rome" on all his sculptures, was modest and extremely reserved. Although he created several monumental statues for the façade of the Paris City Hall, the Palais Garnier or the Commercial Court of the capital (sixteen caryatids of one meter eighty, in 1868), posterity only retains the memory of his small edition bronzes marked by the orientalist current of the time.

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