Émile Namur

Sotheby's London, European Sculpture & Works of Art 900-1900, 21 April 2004, lot 142

Namur’s career was inaugurated with the Concours de sculpture first prize for his plaster model of De schuldige at the Brussels Academy in 1873. Thereafter, he received regular commissions for work on either an intimate or monumental scale. Only two years after his academy success, for example, he was asked to sculpt historical figures for the Hôtel de Ville in Brussels and in 1876 he held the first exhibition for ‘L’Essor’, the movement he founded together with Julien Dillens and the painter Léon Herbo. Members of the group were concerned with realism and exhibited annually until 1881 and as far afield as London.

1881 was also the year of Namur’s greatest success, when he exhibited the 133cm. high plaster seated figure of Assepoester (Cinderella) at the Salon in Brussels: it went to Paris the following year, the Amsterdam International Exhibition the year after that and reappeared in bronze at the Salon of 1884. A marble was finally completed in time for the Paris World Exhibition of 1889 (dated 1881, Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent).

Interestingly, the Cinderella appears to share the same face and hair arrangement as the present La Cigale and one wonders if they were not inspired by the same artist's model: Namur is said to have studied the figure from nature (see La Chronique, 8^th Oct. 1881). That said, both works are more sentimental in style than the naturalism one might have expected from a member of L’Essor.

The present figure of La Cigale is in fact a reduced version of a larger-than-life size marble statue mounted in the Ambiorixplein in Brussels and probably that exhibited at the Brussels World Exhibition of 1897. It differs only in the arrangement of the supporting vine or tree trunk. A plaster reduction is known to exist in the Museum of O.C.M.W. in Brussels but it is not clear if it relates directly to the present lot.

In the mid 1890’s Namur attempted some highly accomplished animalier sculpture of which the large bronze Serpent attacked by a Crocodile in the Brussels Botanical Gardens is surely one of his masterpieces. He also executed a bust of the famous 17^th century Flemish sculptor Gabriel Grupello.

RELATED LITERATURE

J. Van Lennep (ed.), La Sculpture Belge au 19ème Siècle, ex. cat., vol.2, Générale de Banque pp. 517-19; C. Engelen and M. Marx, Beeldhouwkunst in België pp. 1204-05