Exhibition at the museum

Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827-1905), Ethnographic Sculptor

From February 03rd to May 02nd, 2004 -

Musée d'Orsay

Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
75007 Paris

Charles Cordier-Homme du Soudan en costume algérien. Titres historiques Nègre, costume algérien (Salon de 1857) ; Nègre du soudan (Exposition univreselle de 1889) — Charles Henri Joseph Cordier
*Homme du Soudan en costume algérien. Titres historiques : Nègre, costume algérien (Salon de 1857) ; Nègre du Soudan (Exposition universelle de 1889)*, entre 1856 et 1857
Musée d'Orsay
Achat par la maison de l'Empereur Napoléon III, 1857
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
See the notice of the artwork

Charles Cordier (Cambrai 1827 - Algiers 1905), a pupil of Rude, occupies a special place in French sculpture of the second half of the nineteenth century.
In 1848, the very year slavery was abolished in France, he caught visitors' attention at the Salon by exhibiting a bust of a Sudanese. Appropriating an ethnographic science then only in its beginnings, he was also remarkable for his use of polychromy in sculpture, in particular of the onyx-marble of Algeria. From his ethnographic missions in Algeria, Greece and Egypt, he brought back busts and medallions, portraits born of his encounters with the natives.