Overall height: 24cm (9.5in)
Patinated bronze bust of Napoleon I after Antoine Denis Chaudet (1783-1810). Signed to the herm form base, ‘F. Barbedienne, Fondeur’.
The present bust is based on the marble by Chaudet, the official sculptor to the Premier Consul and Imperial family from 1802. Following Napoleon’s defeat at and exile in 1815, scorn for Napoleon gave way to admiration. Lady Holland, for instance, raised a bust of the exiled ex-dictator on a nine foot high column in her garden at Holland House, above an inscription that reminded fellow admirers that on a 'distant, sea-girt island, harsh men the hero keep'. The present bronze further reflects the revival of enthusiasm for Napoleon that followed the return of his mortal remains to France in 1840 and continued to flourish under the Second Empire (1852-70).
Ferdinand Barbardienne (1810-1892) was one of the most prestigious nineteenth century Paris metal workers and bronze founders. The son of a farmer from Calvados, he went partnership in 1838 with Achille Collas (1795-1859), who had just invented a machine to downsize monumental sculptures to more manageable sizes by mechanic reduction. The first cast using ‘reduction mecanique’ was of the Venus de Milo discovered in 1820. Other classical and celebrated subjects followed and as a testament to the assured quality of their output, artists, such as Rude, Barye, Mene and Rodin all had their work cast by the partnership. With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 the firm briefly had to switch to cannon founding owing to the shortage of metals but resumed business afterwards.