Estimate

20.000 - 40.000

Session 2

16 December 2024

Hammer Price

Description

White marble sculpture
Black marble column
Signed and dated 1883

Height: 92 cm (busto) Height: 105 cm (coluna)

Category

Sculpture

Additional Information

Provenance:
Former Dukes of Palmela collection

In 1880, the sculptor Maria Luísa de Sousa Holstein exhibited a bust of the Marquês de Sá da Bandeira, at the Exhibition of Fine Arts, which was highlighted by Ramalho Ortigão in the newspaper Diário da Manhã on
July 23 of that year. According to Sandra Costa Saldanha, the main scholar of this sculptor's artistic work, it is “a first version” for a second bust, also in marble, which was offered by the author to the Military Museum of Lisbon in 1883. Later, in 1909, a copy of the same sculpture was made, offered to the Geographical Society.
Although dated 1883, everything leads us to believe that the work under analysis, which remained in the collections of Maria Luísa's family, is the aforementioned “first version” exhibited in 1880, and it can be admitted that the creation of the Military Museum's version motivated her to only sign and date the first piece.
Comparing the two sculptures, they coincide almost entirely in the representation of the bust, dressed and decorated with military insignia, but they differ in the arrangement of the face, looking at the viewer, in the “first version,” and looking up, in the second. But both manifest the same stylistic values: the excellent mastery of technicalities, in accordance with the naturalism that characterizes the last phase of European academic sculpture; the taste of capturing and representing physiognomic resemblance without any idealization of the model. With these options, the final portrait is a memory and a tribute to one of the most respected statesmen of Portuguese monarchical liberalism who died in 1876.
Maria Luísa de Sousa Holstein considers herself, in this and other works, to be, using the words of Ramalho Ortigão, “an artist in the most beautiful sense of the word”, in fact the only woman sculptor who was at the same level as her colleagues, all of whom men, from Anatole Calmels to António Teixeira Lopes.

Raquel Henriques da Silva