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Lot Essay
Raimondo Pereda (1840-1915) was born in Lugano and studied at the Accademia de Brera in Milan. He exhibited in Munich from 1870 to 1884 and at the Paris Salon in 1879-80. His works were also shown in Parma and London, at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. Pereda became an honorary member of the Brera Academy and was a member of the Swiss Federal Commission of Fine Arts.
Principally sculpting in Carrara marble, here Pereda adopts the radical vogue for polychrome sculpture which had first been made fashionable by the French sculptor Charles Cordier from the mid-19th century. Cordier combined bronze and marble to create legitimate ethnographic portraits, and although Pereda’s choice of subject is more sentimental, the realism is no less startling.
The use of white marble with bronze faces for orientalist subjects was also adopted successfully by Pereda’s Milanese contemporaries Pietro Calvi (d. 1884) notably for his busts of Othello and Selika, and Luigi Pagani (d. 1904) for a pair of magnificent busts of Nelusko and Selika, sold ‘Property from the Collection of Peter Glenville and Hardy William Smith’, Christie’s, New York, 28 October, lot 170 ($321,100).
Principally sculpting in Carrara marble, here Pereda adopts the radical vogue for polychrome sculpture which had first been made fashionable by the French sculptor Charles Cordier from the mid-19th century. Cordier combined bronze and marble to create legitimate ethnographic portraits, and although Pereda’s choice of subject is more sentimental, the realism is no less startling.
The use of white marble with bronze faces for orientalist subjects was also adopted successfully by Pereda’s Milanese contemporaries Pietro Calvi (d. 1884) notably for his busts of Othello and Selika, and Luigi Pagani (d. 1904) for a pair of magnificent busts of Nelusko and Selika, sold ‘Property from the Collection of Peter Glenville and Hardy William Smith’, Christie’s, New York, 28 October, lot 170 ($321,100).