French Bronze of La Baigneuse after Étienne-Maurice Falconet

#18275: French Bronze of La Baigneuse after Étienne-Maurice Falconet
After Falconet, Étienne-Maurice (French, 1716–1791)
French, circa 1880
Height 60cm, width 19.5cm, depth 19.5cm

This patinated bronze depicts a nude bather drawing up her drapery as she steps forward to test the water with her foot. It reproduces one of the most widely repeated compositions in eighteenth-century French sculpture, the Baigneuse, also known as the Nymphe qui descend au bain, after the model by Étienne-Maurice Falconet (French, 1716–1791). The figure is raised on a stepped square plinth and carries a deep brown patina that gathers the light across the flesh and the folds of the drapery.
The young woman stands with her weight on one leg and her head bowed, her eyes lowered and her hair dressed low and drawn back from the face. With one hand she gathers a length of drapery, which falls across a foliage-clad tree stump beside her, while she advances one foot to the water's edge. The smooth, burnished treatment of the body is set against the crisp chasing of the hair, the drapery and the naturalistic detail of the base, where reeds and a scallop shell are worked among the folds. The inclination of the head and shoulders and the slight turn of the torso give the figure a quiet contrapposto, in keeping with the sculptor's canon of slender proportions, sloping shoulders and a small bust.
Falconet exhibited the original marble at the Salon of 1757, where it met with considerable success. The composition was repeated by the sculptor himself and copied widely thereafter, in Sèvres biscuit porcelain and in marble and bronze reductions produced throughout the nineteenth century. The present figure belongs to this tradition of casts after Falconet's model, the pose deriving from the woman testing the water first treated by François Lemoyne in his painted Bather of 1724.
Signed and dated 'Falconet 1757' in the cast, to the ground beside the figure.
 $7,125