Abstract
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Paris was home to scores of bronze foundries making it the primary European center for the production of artistic bronzes, or bronzes d’art. These foundries were competitive, employing different casting methods—either lost-wax or sand casting—as well as closely guarded alloy and patina recipes. Recent studies have demonstrated that accurate measurements of the metal composition of these casts can provide art historians of early 20th-century bronze sculpture with a richer understanding of an object’s biography, and help answer questions about provenance and authenticity. In this paper, data from 171 20th-century bronzes from Parisian foundries are presented revealing diachronic aspects of foundry production, such as varying compositional ranges for sand casting and lost-wax casting. This new detailed knowledge of alloy composition is most illuminating when the interpretation of the data focuses on casts by a single artist and is embedded within a specific historical context. As a case study, compositional analyses were undertaken on a group of 20th-century posthumous bronze casts of painted, unbaked clay caricature portrait busts by Honoré-Victorin Daumier (1808–1879).
Highlights
From the early 1900s, France was home to numerous foundries, with Paris being the dominant center for the production of artistic bronzes, or bronzes d’art
Compositional results newly acquired by hand-held X-ray fluorescence (XRF) at the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts over the last 3 years encompassed data from bronzes housed in 4 museum collections: (i) 55 sculptures among the 200 artworks that were part of the Cantor Art Center, Stanford University, mostly by the artist Auguste Rodin; (ii) 18 sculptures by Malvina Hoffman, a former student of Auguste Rodin, part of the collection of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago; (iii) 16 sculptures by Pablo Picasso, part of the collection of the Musée National Picasso, Paris; and (iv) the 2 bust bronzes by Daumier at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), further detailed in this paper
This work highlights the new information provided by an increased body of knowledge on the major element composition for 19th/20th-century fine art bronzes acquired using hand-held XRF on a series of 171 bronzes with known foundry origins
Summary
From the early 1900s, France was home to numerous foundries, with Paris being the dominant center for the production of artistic bronzes, or bronzes d’art. Heritage 2019, 2 sources such as artists’ letters, art dealers’ catalogs, foundry invoices, purchase documents, or casting processes, material evidence can help to assign unmarked bronzes (bronzes that do not bear a foundry mark) to a specific foundry, ascertain casting dates, and shed light on the collaboration between artists, dealers, and foundrymen in the production of modern bronze sculpture This information contributes to a better knowledge of the history and practices of 20th-century Parisian art foundries, and the relationship or competition between different firms [5]. Twenty bronze sculptures from the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) collection [18] were analyzed These were caricatural portrait busts posthumously cast in the first half of the 20th century from a set of unbaked painted clay models (Figure 1a) made between 1832 and 1835 by the French artist. NGA and the AIC busts thought to have been cast by Barbedienne carried Maurice Le Garrec’s monogram They bore one or two edition numbers, and in most cases, the inscription “BRONZE”.
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