Bust of an Oriental Woman - Emile GUILLEMIN (1841-1907)

Orientalist bronze sculpture with triple patina, gilded, dark reddish brown and silvered.

France
circa 1880
total height 63 cm

Biography :
Emile-Coriolan Guillemin (1841-1907) was a Parisian sculptor. He did his artistic apprenticeship with his father Emile-Marie-Auguste Guillemin, then with the sculptor Jean-Jules Salmson. He began at the Salon of French Artists in 1870, with two Roman gladiator plasters, whose bronze casts were acquired by the State for the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He collaborated with the great art editing companies, such as Barbedienne or Christofle. Guillemin continued to exhibit at the Salon until the end of the 1890s, where he exhibited a series of busts of oriental women in bronze. These busts were part of the Orientalist movement and therefore a particular context: Guillemin travelled in North Africa and the Mediterranean basin in order to list the anthropological characteristics of different local cultures, as Charles Cordier did a few years earlier.