"science", Bronze With Brown Patina Signed Mathurin Moreau

La Science, bronze with brown patina signed on the terrace titled on a cartel.
- Cartel on the side: "To the director of the schools of the Guise family, the staff of the childhood education and the former pupils." -

Imagined by Jean Baptiste André Godin, creator of the famous brand of stoves, the Guise family was an extraordinary social experience.
Inspired by the Phalanstère and the theories of Charles Fourier, the familistère aimed to improve the lives of workers and fight against the pauperization of working populations.
This bronze, offered to the director of the schools, constitutes a beautiful tribute to the spirit of the familistère: through science enlightening the world of his knowledge, the human being can free himself from social determinism.

This bronze subject by Mathurin Moreau is not common on the art market. It is a synthesis of another more widespread subject, Science and Engineering.

-M. Pierre Grignon Dumoulin, expert at the Court of Appeal of Amiens

Height: 55 cm

Mathurin MOREAU (1822-1912),
He was admitted to the École des beaux-arts de Paris in 1841 in the workshops of Jules Ramey and Auguste Dumont.
He won the second prize in Rome in 1842 with Diodemus removing the Palladium.
He began at the Salon of French artists in 1848 and stood out there with the statue L'Élégie. He obtained a second class medal at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 in Paris, then a first class medal in 1878. In 1897, he was crowned with a medal of honor at the Salon of which he became a member of the jury during the Exposition Universal of 1900 in Paris. He then exhibited a white marble bust representing Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar (after his bust in Carrara marble and bronze from 1875, entitled: Ismaël, candeur).
Between 1849 and 1879, Mathurin Moreau collaborated with the Val d'Osne art foundry and, as a shareholder, became one of its administrators, but, observes Pierre Kjellberg, “the reign of Napoleon III was also that of fireplace fittings. , and these hitherto very rare sets are multiplying and often appear in the catalogs of bronze publishers ”:
Mathurin Moreau's Reader is part of this enthusiasm. The artist also supplied models to the Compagnie des bronzes de Bruxelles and exhibited at the Central Union of Fine Arts Applied to Industry in the 1880s.
The town hall of the 19th arrondissement of Paris. In 1880, the artist received a bonus during the competition for the erection of an allegorical monument of La Défense de Paris at the Courbevoie roundabout (roundabout at the origin of the Defense district), but it was Louis-Ernest Barrias is awarded the order.
From 1879 and until his death, Mathurin Moreau was elected mayor of the 19th arrondissement of Paris - created in 1860 after annexation of the municipalities of Belleville and La Villette - where the rue Priestley would take the name of avenue Mathurin-Moreau under of the decree of July 16, 1912. The satirical review He died on February 14, 1912 in his home at 15, passage du Monte Negro in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. His funeral took place at the Saint-Jean-Baptiste church in Belleville and he was buried in the Lilas cemetery.