Auguste-hyacinthe Debay - The First Cradle - Signed, Dated 1845 - Patinated Plaster -

In 1845, Auguste-Hyacinthe Debay, presented a sculpture to the Salon that would soon be considered his masterpiece: Le Berceau primitif (N°2070). This high block of white marble immediately seduces the public and convinces the fiercest critics. Charles Baudelaire comments in his book devoted to the exhibition: “it was a painter who made a charming group, Le Berceau primitif - Eve holds her two children on one knee and makes them a kind of basket with her two arms. The woman is beautiful, the children pretty – it is above all the composition of this that we like […]”.

Théophile Gautier is full of praise either: “this entire composition is collected and concentrated with extreme happiness, presenting on all sides lines of harmonious grace. M. Debay handled the brush before touching the chisel; we guess it from a picturesque feeling that sculptors do not usually have”. The group is worth to its author a medal. Exhibited again at the Universal Exhibition of 1855 (No. 4314), it was purchased by one of the greatest collectors of the time, Prince Anatole Demidoff. It soon adorned his Tuscan palace in San Donato, before being sold with the rest of the collections on March 15, 1880 (lot 135). Now disappeared, the work is only known thanks to the few workshop plasters which have survived, then to the posthumous reprints which were executed.

Indeed, in addition to the marble exhibited at the Salon, Debay kept the plaster that served as his model, and a few others, which he intended for institutions to promote his work or for his relatives as a testimony of friendship.

Thus we know:

The original plaster kept at the David d'Angers Museum under inventory number MBA 35 J 1881S

A plaster of the same size offered by the artist and still kept by the Royal Museums of Brussels after its exhibition at the Salon des Beaux -Arts de Bruxelles from 1845 (No. 127)

A few plasters, probably less than ten, are smaller in size and come from the workshop where they were made by Debay. They measure approximately 60 cm, are signed and dated 1845. One was part of the collection of art historian HW Janson in New York, another is kept at the Château de Nemours. The fragility of the material also explains the rarity of examples like ours. It should be noted that during the sale of the workshop, in May 1865, the plaster was listed in the catalog today in the public collections of Angers (lot 55 ), as well as “two reductions” which could very well correspond to our copy (lot 56)

The success of Le Berceau primitive did not end with the death of Debay, quite the contrary. The posthumous casts of Barbedienne and the plasters bearing the stamp "Salvator Marchi, MD et Editeurs de Me Pradier, Bapts" constitute the major part of the prints but are not originals. Our sculpture is one of the rare original copies still in private hands. It allows you to rediscover one of the heights of romanticism in sculpture.

This original vision of the artist of the first maternal tenderness, this choice to represent, not the drama of the first fratricide but the innocence of the first age marked much the contemporaries of Debay. The different levels of reading, the beauty of Eve which is reminiscent of the sweetness of Michelangelo's Madonnas, the rich symbolism of this group also explain its success. Debay, son of a sculptor and author at the age of 13 of a first royal bust, then embarked on a career as a painter thanks to his master Baron Gros. With The First Cradle, he definitively places his name among the great sculptors of the 19th century.