3-065-862 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Une Paysanne Française" (terra cotta), by J. Dalou - from the Royal Academy Exhibition of last year, 1874. 'In this country, where the public is so cold to even the finest works of sculpture..., a furore has seldom been excited so great as that which, on its exhibition last year at the Academy, greeted the group, by M. Dalou, which we have have engraved. The material was novel, for visitors had seldom, if ever, before seen at Burlington House or Trafalgar-square a work so large in terra-cotta. Then, the unflinching realism, the complete absence of idealisation, was a surprise. This woman, with her sabots, her rough, scant raiment, and her swathed head, was in very truth a French peasant - in coarseness of form and commonness of feature, as well as in dress. No doubt the model was copied from the life with extraordinary fidelity. Then, again, the sentiment of maternity was as unquestionably conveyed with great force and firmness. The action of the mother giving suck to her babe (so unconscious of indelicacy), though rendered as the French themselves might phrase it, with a naïveté brutale, was so touchingly natural as to become quite pathetic'. From the Fine Art Supplement to the "Illustrated London News", 1874.