?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
HONORÉ DAUMIER Tête de bourgeois au chapeau haut-de-forme.
Bronze, modeled 1855 (cast later). 163 mm; 6½ inches (height). With the artist's cast initials, and numbered 17/30, lower verso. With the foundry mark Cire perdue C. Valsuani, lower verso.
Provenance: Private collection, New York.
Published: Wasserman, Daumier Sculpture. A Critical and Comparative Study, Cambridge, MA, 1969, page 257-58, number Vb (the terracotta and another bronze cast illustrated).
In addition to his work as a lithographer, draughtsman and painter, Daumier (1808-1879) produced more than 100 sculptures during his long and highly prolific career. He produced many of these sculptures in unbaked clay, some of which were subsequently reproduced in plaster casts for preservation. Bronze editions were all produced posthumously, the artist conceived no bronze editions during his lifetime.
According to Wasserman, French painter Sam Szafran (1934-2019) purchased the unbaked clay model for this casting in 1963 at a Parisian antique fair, the annual Foire à la Ferraille. The clay head was sold to the American collector Joseph H. Hirshhorn, who commissioned the Parisian-New York gallerist Pierre Matisse to have a bronze edition cast by Valsuani foundry. The artist's initials in the Valsuani cast were not present in the clay model, but were added in the wax model before casting.
