Eve after the Fall

The fall of Napoleon III in Summer 1870 put Carpeaux’s career in peril. The following year, during the rule of the short-term radical government of the Paris Commune, he came to London (residing at 34 Brompton Square from May to December that year), in search for new patrons. Alongside portraits busts commissioned by wealthy collectors, Carpeaux made statuettes - generally female nudes - specifically for reproduction, thus making some of his work more accessible to a wider range of buyers.

While this cast terracotta was produced in London in 1871, versions in various materials were issued subsequently by his casting workshop, established in Paris 1873 at his studio on 71, Rue Boileau, Auteuil. The production of cast terracotta sculpture increased during the 18th century and by the time this object was produced it had reached an industrial scale.

The marketing of the female form in such small-scale multiple sculptures involved an implicit eroticism characteristic of much French sculpture of this period. These erotic qualities were apparently acceptable in works produced for private or gallery contexts but provoked controversy when presented in large-scale public sculpture, such as Carpeaux’s famous group for the Paris Opera, ‘La Dance’.

Carpeaux would prove to be a prodigiously influential artist, not the least through his teaching at the Petite Ecole, where he was notably the master of Jules Dalou and Auguste Rodin. He made also his mark on British sculpture. Writing in 1901 about the development of the so-called New Sculpture in Britain from the mid-1870s onwards, the art critic Marion H. Spielmann, said ‘to Carpeaux, no doubt, the inspiration of the new trend was originally due’.