Male Academic Nude (edmond Jean-charles Laethier 1858–1889)

Asking price : 2200 Euros

Edmond Jean-Charles Laethier (1858-1889)
Oil on Canvas 80 x 64 cm

Study of a Male Academic Nude

Unsigned Supplier's stamp on the canvas stretcher :
Chabod, 20 rue Jacob (Paris) on the original stretcher

Provenance : artist's family, sale of several works.

Good condition (Restoration report available upon request)

The Artist :

Edmond Jean-Charles Laethier (Besançon 1858–1889)

He was born into a middle-class family in Besançon with seven children, including his younger brother Georges, a sculptor whom he introduced to drawing and painting.

Edmond, who died at the age of 31, is buried in the same grave as his brother.

A student of Antonin Fanart (a landscape painter who studied in Switzerland) and his pupil Emile Isenbart, Laethier was a painter who traveled to the Congo (watercolor profile of a woman - Art Curial sale; notebooks from the Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza mission (1887/88) : studies of Teke men, a young girl, a woman seen from behind, and a portrait of a Bdouma chief in the Musée du Quai Branly; landscapes of huts and palm trees...).
It would seem, therefore, that Laethier accompanied Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, an aristocrat born in Rome but who served in the French navy, the driving force behind the founding of French Congo and after whom its administrative center, Brazzaville, is named.
He was known for his humanitarian approach and respect for local cultures, which perfectly reflects Edmond Laethier's sketches. If we rely on his sketch of the Teke chief, he would have accompanied Brazza on his second expedition (1879-1882).
Jacques de Brazza's photos, along with these sketches, allow us to present a kind of press conference in France.