Jean-Baptiste CARPEAUX

Carpeaux was born in Valenciennes in northern France. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Art in Paris in 1844 and additionally studied with the Romantic sculptor François Rude. While he would admire Rude throughout his lifetime, in 1850 he abandoned his studio, which was thought controversial by the academicians, and entered that of Francisque Duret in order to better his chances at winning the Grand Prix de Rome and launching an official career. Carpeaux won the prestigious prize in 1854 but his resolve to complete and receive payment for a bas-relief, as well as an eye injury and illness, delayed his arrival at the French Academy in Rome by one year.

The present figures echo a sentimentalised vision of the Mediterranean prevalent at the time, in particular of Naples and its humble classes which were seen as living an ideal life, free and pure. In representing an adolescent boy holding a shell to his ear Carpeaux looks back to the work of his master François Rude and his Jeune pêcheur napolitain (marble, 1831-1833, Musée du Louvre, Paris). Figures listening to a shell are rare in the visual arts, especially when compared to the motif of tritons blowing into a shell, yet precedents exist. The earliest seems to be the Fisher boy by Hiram Powers, conceived in 1841-44 and carved in several marble figures in the following years, such as a version from 1857, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The subject relates to English romantic poetry and writers like William Wordsworth (1770-1850) describe children listening to a shell to find out when the tide will come. The pair has also been interpreted as allegories of Sight and Hearing. Carpeaux claimed that he based the Neapolitan Fisherboy on a boy he had seen during a trip to Naples, giving French audiences an exotic glimpse of Italian modern life. The artist wrote in a letter dated 18 September 1858: “My subject is taken from nature; it is a young fisherman of eleven, smilingly listening to the echo in a conch-shell.”[1] The sculpture would in turn inspire other artists and Henry Hudson Kitson’s bronze of Music of the Sea from 1884 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) shows a grinning boy listening to a shell. 

The Girl with a Shell relates to classical sculpture and various kneeling Venuses or nymphs associated with a shell, such as Venus kneeling on a tortoise (c. 250 BC, Museo del Prado, Madrid) who holds a perfume bottle above her head. The Girl with a Shell sits on an overturned wicker basket full of fish, holding the shell on her head like a hat or an ornament. Smiling, she looks coquettishly at the viewer from under her raised arm. Posing playfully with the conch, the young girl seems to defuse the erotic connotation traditionally attached to shells. Both statues, with their naturalistic vitality, are full of charm and grace.