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Lot Essay
We are grateful to Virginia Budny, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Lachaise Foundation, for her assistance in preparing the catalogue entry for this work.
Gaston Lachaise, one of the foremost American sculptors of the first half of the 20th century, is best known for his images of powerful women inspired by Isabel Dutaud Nagle (1872-1957), his muse, lover, and, from 1917, wife. Yet, by his own account, few of those works are actual portraits of her. The present statuette is a rare exception. The work began as a plaster model for a statuette named Portrait [LF 196] created in 1918 or 1919 and first exhibited in Lachaise’s second show, at the Bourgeois Gallery, New York, in early 1920. Sometime after the spring of 1921, a juror, said to be the sculptor Alexander Calder (1870-1945), who was installing the plaster in a group exhibition, dropped both that model and a second plaster of Lachaise’s wife (G. Seldes, Profile of Gaston Lachaise, "Hewer of Stone," The New Yorker, New York, April 4, 1931, p. 28). Lachaise repaired and revised the model for Portrait sometime before February 1928, when the first bronze cast of the new version, produced in that year, went on view in the prestigious Brummer Gallery, New York, as Woman on Divan. That cast, the only example made during Lachaise’s lifetime, now belongs to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., where it is named Woman on a Couch.
When revising the statuette, Lachaise retained much of the original version, in which the forms of his wife’s body, clothing, and furnishings had already been considerably simplified. His most noteworthy revisions are the tighter modeling of her head and neck and the position of her proper right arm and hand. No longer holding that hand close to her side, she now dramatically extends her open palm, penetrating the implied front plane of the earlier composition with her enigmatic gesture, as though projecting her inner force. No other bronze casts of this second version were made until the 1960s, when the Lachaise Estate authorized an edition of eleven numbered casts to be made from the model, producing the first two, including the present example, in 1964. Seven others were issued from 1968 to 2001. The Estate edition includes the casts owned by the Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science, Evansville, Indiana (2⁄11), the Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville (6⁄11), and and the Museum of the City of New York (7⁄11). The revised statuette has often been dated 1928 on the basis of the inscription carved by Lachaise into the plaster model (and later abraded), yet the inscribed date was that of the copyright, not that of the model—which was probably completed earlier. The model is owned by the Lachaise Foundation, and the catalogue number LF 69 has been assigned to the work.
Gaston Lachaise, one of the foremost American sculptors of the first half of the 20th century, is best known for his images of powerful women inspired by Isabel Dutaud Nagle (1872-1957), his muse, lover, and, from 1917, wife. Yet, by his own account, few of those works are actual portraits of her. The present statuette is a rare exception. The work began as a plaster model for a statuette named Portrait [LF 196] created in 1918 or 1919 and first exhibited in Lachaise’s second show, at the Bourgeois Gallery, New York, in early 1920. Sometime after the spring of 1921, a juror, said to be the sculptor Alexander Calder (1870-1945), who was installing the plaster in a group exhibition, dropped both that model and a second plaster of Lachaise’s wife (G. Seldes, Profile of Gaston Lachaise, "Hewer of Stone," The New Yorker, New York, April 4, 1931, p. 28). Lachaise repaired and revised the model for Portrait sometime before February 1928, when the first bronze cast of the new version, produced in that year, went on view in the prestigious Brummer Gallery, New York, as Woman on Divan. That cast, the only example made during Lachaise’s lifetime, now belongs to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., where it is named Woman on a Couch.
When revising the statuette, Lachaise retained much of the original version, in which the forms of his wife’s body, clothing, and furnishings had already been considerably simplified. His most noteworthy revisions are the tighter modeling of her head and neck and the position of her proper right arm and hand. No longer holding that hand close to her side, she now dramatically extends her open palm, penetrating the implied front plane of the earlier composition with her enigmatic gesture, as though projecting her inner force. No other bronze casts of this second version were made until the 1960s, when the Lachaise Estate authorized an edition of eleven numbered casts to be made from the model, producing the first two, including the present example, in 1964. Seven others were issued from 1968 to 2001. The Estate edition includes the casts owned by the Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science, Evansville, Indiana (2⁄11), the Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville (6⁄11), and and the Museum of the City of New York (7⁄11). The revised statuette has often been dated 1928 on the basis of the inscription carved by Lachaise into the plaster model (and later abraded), yet the inscribed date was that of the copyright, not that of the model—which was probably completed earlier. The model is owned by the Lachaise Foundation, and the catalogue number LF 69 has been assigned to the work.