Alfred GILBERT 1854/1934, Chryselephantine, Art Deco, Pierrot

Alfred GILBERT 1854/1934, Chryselephantine, Art Deco, Pierrot

Period: 1920 / 30 Art Deco, Chryselephantine in Ivory and lost-wax Bronze with several patinas and on a black marble base, in excellent condition.

Signed: A. Gilbert, XXth Art Deco artist, referenced and highly regarded,

The work of art: Pierrot à la mandoline
Dimensions: height: 22 cm, width: 31 cm, depth: 18 cm

Biography:
Alfred GILBERT 1854 / 1934

Alfred Gilbert, born in London on August 12, 1854, and died on November 4, 1934, was an English sculptor and silversmith.

His works are marked by innovations in metallurgy. He played a central role in New Sculpture, an artistic movement that renewed sculpture in Great Britain at the end of the 19th century. Alfred Gilbert also enriched sculpture with the thematic and stylistic particularities of the Art Nouveau movement.

Alfred Gilbert's parents, Charlotte Cole and Alfred Gilbert, were both musicians living in London when he was born. He was mainly educated in Paris, at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, where he was a pupil of Jules Cavelier. He then studied in Rome and Florence, Italy, where Renaissance art had a profound influence on his future work, particularly the great Florentine Mannerist bronzes. He also worked in the studio of sculptor Joseph Boehm, and was influenced by Boehm's assistant, Édouard Lanteri (1848-1917).

On January 3, 1876, he married one of his cousins, Alice Jane Gilbert (1847-1916), with whom he had moved to Paris. They had five children.

Gilbert joined London's Royal Academy in 1887, becoming a full member in 1892, before resigning in 1909. He taught sculpture at the Academy until 1900. In 1889, he won the Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and in 1897 was made a member of the Royal Victorian Order. He later became a member of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Engravers.

Having encountered major financial difficulties, he went bankrupt and was forced to leave the UK in 1901. For the next twenty-five years, he lived in Bruges, Belgium. His wife left him in 1904 and was placed in a psychiatric hospital, but they never divorced.

After his wife's death in 1916, Alfred Gilbert married his governess, Stéphanie Debourgh (1863-1937), on March 1, 1919, six of whose seven children had lived with Gilbert until 1907 and then through the First World War and the German occupation.

Gilbert went to Rome in 1923 and, three years later, returned to England to complete the Clarence Memorial, this time under royal patronage. He completed the Monument to Queen Alexandra (en), unveiled in London in 1932. Gilbert was knighted and re-elected to the Royal Academy. In his final years, he achieved recognition in the highest echelons of British artistic society before his death in 1934.

His first major works were sculptures such as Mother and Child, then The Kiss of Victory, followed by Perseus arming himself (1906), all conceived under the obvious influence of the sculptures he studied in Florence. His success was considerable, and he was immediately commissioned by the sculptor Frederic Leighton to create Icarus, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884, to general acclaim. He later produced the Enchanted Armchair, which he later destroyed, as he did many of his works that he considered unfinished or unworthy of his talent. The following year, Gilbert turned his attention to the fountain at the Shaftesbury Memorial (en) in London's Piccadilly Circus, a work of great originality and beauty depicting Anteros.

In 1887, he created Queen Victoria's Jublilee Monument in Winchester, whose finely detailed ornamentation makes it one of the most remarkable sculptures of this style in Britain. Other sculptures of great beauty, both in their conception and in the delicacy of their treatment, include the Monument to Lord Reay in Bombay and the Monument to John Howard in Bedford (1898), whose highly original plinth has greatly reoriented the hitherto rather eccentric works of Art Nouveau artists.

Gilbert's sense of decoration is paramount in all his work. In addition to the works already mentioned, this delicate style can be found in busts of Cyril Flower, John R. Clayton (destroyed by the artist), George Frederic Watts, Henry Tate, George Birdwood, Richard Owen, George Grove and many others. However, his reputation as an artist rests above all on his goldsmith's work, with creations such as the necklace for the Mayor of Preston, the centerpiece for Queen Victoria, the Victory figures (a statuette designed for the Winchester statue), as well as a large number of objects more p

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