Charles Jacquot, The Prayer In The Fields (circa 1888)

CHARLES JACQUOT (1865 Bains-les-Bains -1 930 Paris)
The Prayer in the fields, also known as the Angelus
Circa 1888
Bronze, green patina
H. 58 cm
Signed on the base: Jacquot / Blot ft
Founder: Eugène Blot
Plaster exhibited at the Salon of 1887, no 4112
Bronze model exhibited at the Salon of 1888, no 4263

Charles Jacquot, the young sculptor from Lorraine, exhibited the plaster of the Prayer in the Fields at the Salon of 1887. It received an honorable mention from the Salon jury, and at the same time it attracted the attention of critics, including this passage by François Thiébault-Sisson in La Nouvelle Revue: “The same praise should be made of Prière aux champs, in lightly tinted plaster, exhibited by M. Charles Jacquot. Bareheaded and religiously bowed, barefoot, hands clasped, shirt chastely drawn around a budding throat, a sixteen-year-old girl says the Angelus, sounded by a distant bell. It is delicate, it is chaste and it is exquisite. She embodies the spring, this young girl." (Thibault-Soissin, 1887, p. 369-370). As an artist from Nancy by adoption - Jacquot entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nancy in 1883 - the Prière aux champs was reproduced in the journal Nancy Artiste, in the special edition La Lorraine au Salon in 1887. In 1887 the state bought and photographed the plaster, unfortunately now lost. In 1888, the following year, Jacquot exhibited a version of his great success in bronze. In the Salon catalogue this new piece was described as "a statuette", an indication perhaps that the bronze was smaller than the plaster from the previous year. Additionally, it is mentioned that the bronze "belongs to M. E Blot". Eugène Blot was the heir to a foundry of popular statuettes and a leading collector of modern art including the Impressionists. In the early 1890s he changed the direction of the family business from industrial zinc statuettes to artistic bronzes. Today, as a founder, Blot is best known for his bronzes after models by Camille Claudel, often, one might add, with the same beautiful green patina as this example of the Prière aux Champs. The bronze edition by Blot of the Prière aux Champs/Prayer in the Fields remains very rare, a copy 86 cm in height entered the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, in 1904. At the same time, as a great success, statuettes of the pious peasant proliferated in plaster, bronze of poor quality, spelter and terracotta. Jacquot himself returned to the subject and exhibited a version in marble at the Salon of 1909, currently, like the original plaster, lost. In relation to Jacquot's figure it is impossible not to mention Jean-François Millet's Angelus, painted between 1857 and 1859, because this masterpiece, today in the Musée d'Orsay, was one of the most importpant images of the time. But of all the sculptors who treated this subject (one thinks of the model by Émile Peynot for example), it is above all Jacquot's praying girl who wins the honors. Jacquot's original drawing for his statue is kept in the Louvre.