Estimate

20.000 - 40.000

Session 2

16 December 2024

Hammer Price

Description

White marble sculpture
Signed and dated "Lisboa 1871"
(missing back of head, restored plinth)

Height: 86 cm (busto) Height: 118 cm (coluna)

Category

Sculpture

Additional Information

Provenance:
Former Dukes of Palmela collection

The French sculptor Anatole Calmels settled in Portugal in the 1860s where he carried out important public commissions, including the sculptural sets for the Rua Augusta Arch and the pediment of the City Hall, both in Lisbon, and the equestrian statue of D. Pedro IV in Porto.
Possibly commissioned by King Dom Luís I, Calmels created this bust of D. Pedro V, who died in 1861, when he was just 24 years old. Previously, in 1866, the sculptor had created a very identical work but of smaller dimensions and with a more restrained display in the representation of the insignia of the three orders and the ornaments on the general's uniform. The disposition of the face also differs, moving from a slight twist to a more distant frontality. But in both works, the sculptor captures the model's youth, well expressed in the modeling of the thin face and the cut of the wavy hair. This creates an expressive contrast between the majestic apparatus of the costume and the informality of youth that will provoke in the spectator the memory of a promising destiny that early death did not allow to be fulfilled. That is why he was, in the distasteful designations of the time, “the hopeful” and the “Much Beloved”

Raquel Henriques da Silva