Le Chinois (Chinese Man) by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

In 1867, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, one of the most celebrated French sculptors of the 19th century, received a major commission from the city architect of Paris for a monumental sculpture topping a fountain between the Luxembourg Palace (the seat of the French Senate) and the Paris Observatory. For this site, an important reference point aligning political power and scientific knowledge, Carpeaux created Les Quatre Parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste (The Four Parts of the World Supporting the Celestial Sphere). The work represents the four continents of Africa, Asia, Europe, and America personified as four female figures holding aloft an abstract representation of the cosmos, with Earth at its center.

In preparations for this commission, Carpeaux made this work, originally titled Le Chinois (Chinese Man), in his Paris studio. The identity of the sitter remains unknown, but typical for this period of the Qing dynasty, he wears a changshan robe and his hair in a queue, a style marked by a shaved forehead and long braid.

Carpeaux’s figure is detailed and sensitively modeled, with particular attention paid to the dynamic energy and movement of the body. In the turn of the figure’s head, Carpeaux offers his subject an air of dignity and contemplation. One can imagine the individuality of the person rendered in this bust. At the same time, the context for the work as a study for The Four Parts of the World, and its subsequent circulation as an ethnographic sculpture among the French elite, transforms the subject into a physiognomic type, an individual standing in for an enormously diverse population.

Apparently unable to find a female model from Asia, for the final version of The Four Parts of the World Carpeaux grafted a modified version of this sculpture onto the classicized body of a female figure. Although the work appears faithful to the individual, this interchangeability stands as a reminder that Carpeaux’s Chinese Man is the product of a colonial imagination, made in the service of reflecting the power and prestige of the French Second Empire.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French, 1827–1875)
Chinese Man, c. 1872
Bronze
Purchase, Academy Volunteers Fund, 1979 (4750.1)