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拍品專文
A seated melancholic creature biting his nails with a dejected stare, Mephistopheles is so tortured because he is forced to collect the souls of the damned for Lucifer. Inspired by literary works such as Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost and Goethe's Faust, in which the demon warns Faustus of the choice he is making by selling his soul to the Devil. Far from being monstrous, Mephistopheles is a very human, pitiable, creature. His isolation is amplified by his enormous wings, symbolizing a fallen angel and the fallibility of man, he is a metaphor for the artist, himself, who, through his work, also defies the Creator.
Titled Satan when first exhibited in plaster at the Salon of 1834 (nº 2037) and cast in bronze the following year, the artist produced an enlarged and reworked version in 1850 measuring 80 cm. high, of which three examples are known: one is at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and another is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Reductions were cast, some with the foundry inscription ‘E. de Labroue. Gautier et Cie’, measuring 34 cm. and 21 cm. high. Reminiscent of Delacroix’s drawing of 1827, Mephistopheles in the Air, intended to illustrate Goethe's Faust, his pose is probably inspired by the famous engraving of Melancholy by Dürer, of which the artist had a copy. Praised at the Salon as ‘a personification, with plenty of verve and ardour, of the evil genius at odds with being powerless’ (Le musée: revue du Salon de 1834, p.74). Matthew Winterbottom, Curator of European Art, Ashmolean Museum says ‘Feuchère’s Satan is one of the most forceful and expressive examples of brooding melancholy in Romantic art and is often seen as a precursor of Rodin’s Thinker’.
Titled Satan when first exhibited in plaster at the Salon of 1834 (nº 2037) and cast in bronze the following year, the artist produced an enlarged and reworked version in 1850 measuring 80 cm. high, of which three examples are known: one is at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and another is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Reductions were cast, some with the foundry inscription ‘E. de Labroue. Gautier et Cie’, measuring 34 cm. and 21 cm. high. Reminiscent of Delacroix’s drawing of 1827, Mephistopheles in the Air, intended to illustrate Goethe's Faust, his pose is probably inspired by the famous engraving of Melancholy by Dürer, of which the artist had a copy. Praised at the Salon as ‘a personification, with plenty of verve and ardour, of the evil genius at odds with being powerless’ (Le musée: revue du Salon de 1834, p.74). Matthew Winterbottom, Curator of European Art, Ashmolean Museum says ‘Feuchère’s Satan is one of the most forceful and expressive examples of brooding melancholy in Romantic art and is often seen as a precursor of Rodin’s Thinker’.