David (Portrait Bust)

Jean Baptiste de Keyser was born on 22 of April in 1857 in Curreghem (Belgium) and attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. His first entry in to the Paris Salon in 1882 was David devant Saul, which won him an honorable mention. A year later the bronze group was exhibited at the Royal Acedmy in London and both the Prince of Wales and the British Embassy in Rome commisssioned bronze casts, and Marie Henriette, Queen of Belgium, purchased a bronze reduction. It is possible that the head of David in the present lot was extracted from this group.

De Keyser co-founded the Art and Industrial Schools of his hometown of Cureghem near Anderlecht, where he taught drawing classes until the 1920s.