Bust of Saïd Abdullah of the Darfour People

1848

Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier (French, 1827-1905)
Cast by Eck et Durand Fondeur (French, 19th century)

This naturalistic yet idealized likeness depicts a formerly enslaved Sudanese man, Saïd Abdullah, who visited Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier in his Paris studio. It reflects the 19th-century fascination with non-European costumes, customs, and physiognomies, called Orientalism, as well as the burgeoning field of anthropology. A plaster cast of this bust was Cordier’s first entry to the Paris Salon, in 1848, and one of the few sculpted images of Black figures shown publicly up to that point. The air of nobility this figure projects may reflect opposition to the practice of slavery, which had been abolished in the French colonies that same year.

Status: On View, Gallery 223
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist: Charles Henri Joseph Cordier
Title: Bust of Saïd Abdullah of the Darfour People
Place: France (Object made in:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1848
Medium: Bronze
Inscriptions: Inscribed: CH. CORDIER 1848
Dimensions: 82.5 × 45.7 × 35.6 cm (32 1/2 × 18 × 14 1/16 in.)
Credit Line: Ada Turnbull Hertle Fund
Reference Number: 1963.839
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/18751/manifest.json

“R. & M. Andrade,” Apollo 121, 423 (1960), p. x.
Art Institute of Chicago, Annual Report, 1963-64, p. 19.
John Maxon, Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly 58, 1 (1964).
S. Réveilluad Kriz, L’Odyssée d’un peintre: Drouet Réveilluad (Paris: Fischbacher, 1973), p. 17.
Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Exotische Welten, Europäsische phantasien (1987), pp. 357, 491, no. 3.62.
New York, Charles Janoray, LLC, A Golden Age of French Sculpture, 1850-1900 (2003), p. 40, fig. 1.
Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Charles Cordier, 1827-1905: l’autre et l’ailleurs (2004), pp. 15, 18, 205, no. 474.
For comparison, see:
Stanislas Lami, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l’école Francaise au dix-neuviéme siècle 1, reprint (Liechtenstein, 1970), p. 417.
Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art IV, 2 (Cambridge, MA, 1976-1989), pp. 100-02, fig. 72.
Jeannine Durand-Revillon, “Un promoteur de la sculpture polychrome sous le Second Empire, Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier (1827-1905),” Soc. Hist. Art Francais (1982), pp. 182, 192, fig. 1.
Hermann Pollig, et al, Exotische Welten, Europäsische Phantasien (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 357, 374, 491, no. 3.61.
Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, et al, La Sculpture ethnographique, de la Vénus hottentote à la Tehura de Gauguin (Paris, 1994), p. 55, no. 33.
Elyse Nelson and Wendy S. Walters, eds., Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered, exh. cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 50, 53, pl. 29, 67-9, 94.

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered, Mar. 7, 2022-Mar. 5, 2023, pl. 29.

Cast in Paris, 1848 and believed to be the original pair cast for the artist [see letter from Gerald Kerin in curatorial object file]; possibly sold directly by the artist to an English private collector in Devon, 1851 [according to letter from William Redford, in curatorial file; Cordier brought ethnographic busts to the 1862 London Exposition, see Exotische Welten, p. 357]; purchased from this collection by William Redford, the agent for Gerald Kerin, Ltd. [see same letter in curatorial file]; sold by Gerald Kerin, Ltd. to the Art Institute, 1963.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

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