Jean Baptiste Carpeaux (French 1827 -1875): A bronze figure of Le Jeune pêcheur à la coauille (Neapolitan Fisher Boy)

Footnotes

Carpeaux was a student at the École des Beaux Arts and won the Prix de Rome in 1854. Inspired by the old master sculptors of the Italian Renaissance and influenced by his master Francoise Rude (1784 -1855), he moved to Rome in 1854 where he worked until 1861. It was in Rome that he developed his signature style utilising the principles of baroque art while depicting everyday subject matter.

in 1857 whilst a student in Rome, Carpeaux made a plaster model of Pêcheur Napolitain à la coquille(the Neapolitan Fisherboy), a subject which is now perhaps more synonymous with his work. First shown at the 1858 Salon, this original plaster is now in the Musée D'Orsay. Several years later he carved the marble version which was displated at the Salon exhibition in 1863. This same piece was purchased by Napoleon III for his wife, the Empress Eugenie and is now in the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris. A further marble version is in the National GAllery of Art in Washington, USA.

Carpeaux subsequently produced a number of editions in terracotta, marble and in bronze including casts by Victor Adolphe Thiébaut, and the model was also posthumously cast in bronze and terracotta, most prolifically by Susse Freres after his death well into the 1930s.

Related Literature
M.Poletti and A.Richarme, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux sculpteur: Catalogue raisonne de l'oeuvre edite, Paris, 2003, pp.63, no.SA9
A.Middleton Wagner, Jean Baptiste Carpeaux, Sculptor of the Second Empire,Yale University Press, 1989