Arabe Coulougli

Cordier began sculpting representations of black men, primarily North African and Sudanese when, as an apprentice, his workplace was visited by an artist’s model and freed black slave from the Sudanese Kingdom of Darfour, Seïd Enkess. Enkess sat for Cordier for fifteen days and the resulting plaster cast Saïd Abdalla de la tribu de Mayac, royaume du Darfour (no. 4676) was Cordier’s first entry to the Salon and won an honorable mention. Ultimately, Cordier’s career focused on Orientalist sculpture that straddled the line between ethnography and portraiture. Cordier’s sent a bronze of Saïd Abdalla to London as part of an exhibition of his work. In response, Queen Victoria commissioned a version of Saïd Abdalla… and a pendant Vénus Africaine now in the Royal Collection Trust (RCIN 41509 and 41510). These two busts would be some of Cordier’s most commercially successful works (A. Childs, The Black Exotic: Tradition And Ethnography In Nineteenth-Century Orientalist Art, University of Maryland, 2005, p. 165).

In his unpublished memoirs Cordier cites the French law of April 27, 1848 abolishing slavery in France and in its colonies, "My art incorporated the reality of a whole new subject, the revolt against slavery and the birth of anthropology." This statement is shown clearly in the Woman from the French Colonies, where he puts emphasis on natural beauty and grace. The artist travelled extensively in Africa and gained an international reputation for the portrayal of different ethnicities, and was initially inspired by the Orientalist movement in art, in particular the works of Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). Cordier’s oeuvre developed a scientific approach where his sculptures show a startling realism and beauty. He wrote in 1865 “race as it is found in its relative beauty, in its absolute truth, with its passions.”
Cordier’s decision to depict black men of the then French colony of Algeria coincided with the abolition of slavery in French colonies and the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy and phrenology being explored in Europe. While Cordier would depict the individuals he encountered with a subtle idealism typical for portraiture and in modern north African dress, his sittings from life displayed them as types instead of portraits, reflecting ‘an artistic and intellectual climate that rarely accepted representations of blacks as individuals, particularly in the context of ethnographic Orientalism’, albeit ‘typical of early ethnographic processes, Cordier’s intent to document the world’s people revealed an assumption that he had the knowledge and skill to authenticate and articulate a series of racial and cultural ‘types’ that he had yet to encounter (op. cit., pp. 161, 178).
In addition to presentation as ethnographical ‘types,’ Cordier’s exhibition based on the 1856 trip to Algeria provided some context to the sitters who were the basis for the work. Arabe de Biscara, was described as:
‘type assez populaire du pays des palmiers. La forme de la tête allongée d'avant en arrière et étroite des tempes caractérise bien la reace qui se distinque surtout par la finesse de l'esprit’
The present lot, Arabe Coulougli, represents the owner of a café in Casbah of Moorish and Turkish descent. The documentary intention of the sculptor is readily apparent as is his intent to infuse the portrayals with the intellectual presence of the sitters. Cordier exhibited versions of both of these works in the 1857 Salon and a version of the former on socle is known to have been in Cordier’s villa in Orsay. In addition to the present examples, which have been on display at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford, CA, versions are also in the Musée de l'Homme, Paris.