Émile Namur

The Belgian sculptor Emile 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, 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 Cendrillon (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, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, inv. no. 1883-O). The sculpture was celebrated by commentators for its 'simplicity, perfect elegance, and extremely fine sensitivity'. The present marble of Cinderella is a sensitively carved reduction of the life-size version.

RELATED LITERATURE

C. Engelen and M. Marx, Beeldhouwkunst in België vanaf 1830, Brussels, 2002, pp. 1204-1205