A FRENCH SILVER SCULPTURAL GROUP OF HERCULES AND THE MARE OF DIOMEDES

SIGNED A. LANSON, PARIS, CIRCA 1890, MAKER'S MARK CB WITH A PIPE

Details

A FRENCH SILVER SCULPTURAL GROUP OF HERCULES AND THE MARE OF DIOMEDES
Signed A. Lanson, Paris, circa 1890, maker's mark CB with a pipe
Modelled as Hercules raising his club above his head and holding the wrist of a female centaur in the other hand, the centaur reared on its hindquarters with a bow in one hand, on a rectangular base realistically cast and chased as ground, marked and signed on base
20 7/8in. (53cm.) high; 294oz. (9151gr.)

Lot Essay

Alfred-Désiré Lanson was a well-known academic sculptor. Born in Orléans in 1851, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Rouillard, Jouffroy and Millet and worked most of his life in Paris. In the course of his highly successful career, he exhibited at the Paris Salons from 1870 and until the year of his death in 1898, where he received numerous prizes. He won the competitive Prix de Rome in 1876. In 1889, he was awarded a Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle in Paris for his sculpture âge de fer now in the collection of the Louvre museum. The published report of the jury praised this piece as 'un des plus vigoureux morceaux de la statuaire contemporaine' (Alfred Picard, Rapport du jury international de l'Exposition Universelle de 1889, Paris, 1890, p. 88).

The best essay on the life and work of Lanson is Charles Michau's Alfred Lanson: ses oeuvres,' in Mémoires de la Société d'agriculture, sciences, belles-lettres, et arts d'Orléans, vol. IV, (Orléans: Auguste Gout et Cie., 1904), p. 135-60.