Charles Cordier (1827-1905), Chinese Man and Chinese Woman, 1853

Charles Cordier was one of the pioneers of polychrome sculpture during the Second Empire. He was also the only sculptor to devote most of his work to representing human diversity, including Abyssinians, Algerians, English, Chinese, Egyptians, French, Greeks, Italians, Maltese, Nubians, Sudanese, Turks among others.

In these two busts created for the 1853 Salon, Cordier plays with extraordinary polychromy. He mixes bronze, gilded bronze, silvered bronze, enamel and paint in an extremely rich combination. The diversity of materials used makes it a perfect example of sculpture in colour in the mid-19th-century. The artist later turned to another form of polychromy, using marble and onyx assemblages, for which he is still renowned today.

The acquisition of these busts is an exceptional addition to the collection of Cordier’s sculptures held at the Musée d’Orsay, to be celebrated further with an exhibition in the coming years.

Born in Cambrai (Nord) in 1827, Charles Cordier moved to Paris in 1844 and joined the studio of sculptor François Rude. At the Salon in 1848, he exhibited Saïd Abdallah of the Mayac, Kingdom of the Darfur, a sculpture that marked the beginning of his so-called “ethnographic” work, which, according to the criteria of the time, aimed to represent different human types. At the 1853 Salon, Cordier exhibited the busts of the Chinese Man and Chinese Woman, his earliest attempts at polychrome sculpture. From 1856 onwards, the sculptor travelled to Algeria, then a French département, to “study the different types of the human race from an artistic point of view”. It was there that he discovered the onyx quarries, which had been excavated in ancient times. In 1860, the Emperor Napoleon III purchased two busts from him: Man from Sudan in Algerian Costume and Arab from El Aghouat in Burnous (Musée d’Orsay). The artist triumphed at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1867. Living between Nice and Paris between 1870 and 1890, Cordier continued to send historic works to the Salon. He died in 1905 in Algiers, where he had settled a few years earlier.