Jean-Baptiste Auguste Clésinger

Clésinger’s career was characterised by a remarkable self-belief and ambition. The son of a moderately successful sculptor, Clésinger studied briefly and impatiently under Thorvaldsen and David d’Angers. He wrote to his sister from Rome: ‘I have seen all the sculptors' ateliers…; none of them have half my talent.’ Returning to Paris, Clésinger cultivated friendships with art critics in order to ensure favourable reception for his works. He even went so far as to marry the daughter of the writer and critic George Sand, though the marriage was unsuccessful and short-lived. Following negative criticism of his monument to Francis I in Paris in the mid-1850s, Clésinger felt personally aggrieved and removed to Rome, where he set up an atelier and lived in splendour. After a number of years of absence from the Paris Salon, Clésinger re-entered it in prodigious style, sending eight sculptures in 1859 and six, including his Cléopâtre, (sold in these rooms on 12 July 2017, lot 19) in 1861. A marble version of the present model was presented to the Salon in 1868. These works, asserted the critic Gautier, attested ‘no less to his talent as to his abundance.’

The influence of Antiquity was fundamental to many of Clésinger's sculptures. The present elegant model depicts the Cretan princess Ariadne seated on the back of her husband to be Dionysus’ panther, after her rescue on Naxos, according to Greek mythology. Another version of the model, cast in bronze, is at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, Nice (inv. no. N.Mba 2335), a Barbedienne cast is at the Musée Camille Claudel a Nogent-sur-Seine, and final bronze version is in the collection at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery (inv. no. SC1).