LONDON.- Stuart Lochhead Sculpture returns to Maastricht for the third year, following the great success of 2020, when the gallery sold a bust by the royal baroque sculptor François Girardon to the Château de Versailles, and 2022, with the sale of an important French Renaissance sculpture of the Madonna and Child to the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.
Highlights at the fair will include:
A unique, monumental Bust of Eugène Delacroix by Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824-1887). The bust was created to celebrate Delacroix, the father of Romanticism and the greatest French painter of his generation. It was at the centre of the ceremonies organised on the first anniversary of the painter’s death at the Galerie Martinet in 1864. In front of it, the poet Théophile Gautier carried a toast in honour of Delacroix, during a memorable banquet to which Manet and many personalities of the French art world participated.
Félicie de Fauveau’s Bust of Henri d’Artois and Charlotte Besnard’s Germaine. The pair reflects on the work of women artists who have long been denied their place in the canon of art history.
Born in Italy to French parents, Félicie de Fauveau anticipated the pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, championing the revival of Medieval art. She debuted at the Paris Salon in 1827 and was one of only a handful of women who were recognised as professional sculptors in that period. She enjoyed tremendous acclaim as both a sculptor and decorative artist. Paul Delaroche and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres visited her studio, and she was friendly with the painter Ary Scheffer, who painted her portrait. The Bust of Henri V (1840) is exemplary of her skill as a portrait artist, as well as of her broader interest in the figurative language of the Middle Ages. The bust was exhibited at the only monographic exhibition ever organised on the artist at the Musée d’Orsay in 2013.
Charlotte Besnard received her artistic education from her father and participated in the Salon in 1869, at the age of fifteen. As a woman, she could not take part in the Prix de Rome, but
actively sought out patrons to sponsor her trip to Italy. There, she met her future husband, Albert Besnard. She continued her work after she married, shying away from academic works and turning her attention to more personal subjects. She received international acclaim in France, England and the United States. Germaine, (1894) represents the artist’s daughter, who is sensitively rendered in all its details and liveliness. The sculpture featured in the seminal exhibition “Salon de l’Art Nouveau” in 1895 in Paris.
The gallery stand at the fair (112) will be designed by Kodai and Associates, an architectural studio founded in Kyoto and based in Zurich. The studio is known for their international work as designers of art and cultural venues, such as Shinshoji Zen Museum and Gardens (Fukuyama- City, Hiroshima, Japan) and Japan House (Los Angeles, USA).
The latticework of the stand’s façade will evoke the traditional Kyoto shopfront. The interior layout will include an Old Masters room, showcasing important works from the 16th to the 18th century.
