The Spinner of Procida After Louis Léon CUGNOT... Lot 185

The Spinner of Procida After Louis Léon CUGNOT (1835-1894). The full-length statue represents a young girl from an Italian village on the island of Procida. Delicately dressed in a draped and moulded dress revealing her shape, the spinner with her hair done in the antique style, seems, with her arms raised, to be pulling a thread of wool from her skein. Louis Léon Cugnot, French sculptor, is the son of the statuary Etienne Cugnot. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1854 and was taught by sculptors Georges Diebolt and Francisque Duret. He won the first Grand Prix de Rome in sculpture in 1859 for "Mézence blessé, préservé par l'intrépidité de son Lausos" (Wounded Mezzence, preserved by the fearlessness of his son Lausos) and was therefore a boarder at the Villa Médicis in Rome from 1860 to 1863. Léon Cugnot exhibited for the first time at the Salon des artistes français in 1863 and was present there almost every year until 1889: he received several medals, in particular one at the Universal Exhibition in 1867. His works were famous, we find in particular at the Musée d'Orsay his statue of "Corybante stifling the cries of Jupiter as a child", exhibited until 1981 in the Jardin des Tuileries. Cast iron by the Salin & Fils foundry. Around 1870. Height 171 cm - Base 35 x 35 cm