Acquisition: two busts by Charles Cordier

Charles Cordier’s life and career mirror the uniqueness if his sculpture: he was one of the pioneers of polychrome sculpture under the Second Empire. Right from the start, he focused on modern subjects, initially treated in bronze, without polychromy, and bearing witness to the artist’s determination to devote himself to “the ubiquity of the beautiful”, to depiction of human races and, very early on in his career, to the use of color in sculpture.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Cordier did not vaunt Europeans’ supposed superiority. On the contrary, he upheld the idea of a beauty specific to each civilization, a beauty that he meant to demonstrate artistically. Cordier was only 21 years old when he created this pair.

The artistic taste for “Chinoiserie” developed in the 17^th century, was at its peak in France in the 18^th century, and did not disappear completely thereafter. The busts of the Chinese Man and Woman are portraits of Chung Ataï and his second wife, the mother of his children, Yung Achoi. Chung-Ataï, who was born into a middle-class family in the province of Leong-Lan to the north of Canton, decided to pay a visit to Europe, after the Opium War with England was settled in 1842. It was a rather unusual decision on the part of an affluent member of the Chinese middle class, but he had ties with England due to his being a tea merchant.

Queen Victoria received the couple at Osbourne House on the Ile of Wight, off the south coast of England. From there, they set out on a somewhat extraordinary journey. Paris was their second stop-off, with the family arriving there in October 1851. After Paris, they stayed in Lille and then continued on to The Hague, Rotterdam and Antwerp, a stage in their travels during which Yun-Achoi probably died. Amsterdam, followed by Cologne and Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Munich, where they arrived in February 1853. From Munich, they went to Vienna, then Graz, Budapest, Prague, Carlsbad and finally Milan and Turin. A stay in Naples in 1854 seems to have decided Chung Altaï to return to China with his family.

The busts of the Chinese Man and Woman

There can be no doubt that Cordier immediately thought of creating two luxuriously worked polychrome sculptures, which he would present at the Salon. The accompanying accessories are very much what the era expected of portraits of Chinese subjects: For the Chinese Woman, the small-scale pagoda behind her, the tiny shoes suggesting that she could hardly walk, the long fingernails, and the amazing expression she wears, made yet more disturbing by the use of blue stone for her pupils. The work is signed and dated “CCORDIER / sculp & pinx / 1853”. Cordier sculpted and enameled the two works.

For the Chinese Man, the screen behind him bears witness to Cordier’s attempts to master this technique as well, as the inscription reveals, similar on both works but rendered differently: “CCORDIER / sculp & pinx/ 1853”. The Chinese Man holds a pipe, an allusion to opium, and, like the Woman, has eyes fashioned from blue stone. In both cases, their costumes’ embroidery is rendered with a truly remarkable wealth of detail. Cordier readily accepted differences and saw the couple as representing humankind to the full.

Cordier’s first attempt at complete polychromy

So Cordier’s first attempt at polychromy, exhibited at the 1853 Salon, was this luxurious combination of techniques seldom used in sculpture. Onyx marble only came after his trip to Algeria in 1856. The busts of the Chinese Man and Woman combine two techniques, one recent, galvanoplasty, which had been invented for Maison Christofle in 1842; the other centuries old, enameling, undoubtedly applied by Cordier and his assistants.

Cordier’s Chinese couple sparked some fierce criticism, but fortunately others rightly pointed out that the artist displayed more talent at portraying “exotic races” than Europeans. The Chinese couple’s success was confirmed by the many versions reduced to a single bust, in a variety of materials and sizes: monochrome bronzes, gilded bronze and hard porcelain.

These bronze busts, gilded, silvered and enameled by Cordier himself, were previously absent from France’s public collections. This Chinese family’s story also helps illustrate the development of trade in the mid-19^th century.