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La Tempête et Les Nuées (The Storm and her Clouds)
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François-Raoul Larche
La Tempête et Les Nuées (The Storm and her Clouds)
Bronze, dark brown patina, raised on a green marble base
Overall height 24 inches (61 cm.)
Signed ‘RAOUL LARCHE, Siot-Decauville seal and numbered ‘582 L’, engraved bronze plaque titled ‘THE TEMPEST / RAOUL LARCHE’
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Provenance

 George F. Harding Collection;

George F. Harding Museum, Chicago, 1939;

Art Institute of Chicago, bequest of George F. Harding, 1982;

Deacessioned in 2014

Literature

 D. Renoux, ‘Raoul Larche, statuaire (1860-1912)’ in Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français , 1990, pp. 243-76.

 François-Raoul Larche began his studies in 1878 under François Jouffroy, Jean-

Alexandre Falguière, and Eugène Delaplanche at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux

Arts in Paris. Larche was a regular exhibitor at the official salons from 1884

onward and was awarded the Second Grand Prix in 1886 at the Prix de Rome

competition. At the Exposition Universelle in 1900 he received a gold medal.

After rather traditional beginnings, Raoul Larche became the quintessential Art

Nouveau sculptor through the evocative power of his many works. A road

accident in Paris on June 2, 1912 caused his premature death.

 

When Raoul Larche exhibited his La Tempête et se Nuées  at the Salon of 1896

he shocked and divided the critics and the public. For an artist best known for

exhibiting more peaceful subjects such as Jésus enfant devant les docteurs  in

1890, La Prairie et le Ruisseau  in 1893 and La Mer  in 1894, the group was

certainly a departure.

 

In his review of Larches’ career, Renoux was troubled by La Tempête

 wondering at the artist’s audacity in trying to illustrate something as

“untranslatable” and “elusive” as a storm. For the critic Henri Rochefort it was

a masterwork and he described the work as “Michel-angelesque”.

 

Although highly original in sculpture, the theme of the storm was treated in

some important paintings earlier in the 19th  century. Géricault exhibited his

Radeau de la Méduse , full of exhausted bodies at the Salon of 1819 and Eugène

Delacroix used the theme for his La Barque de Dante  in 1822. This inspiration

is repeated in the latter part of the century with the evocation of La Tempête sur

les côtes de Belle-île  by Claude Monet at the Salon of 1886, and especially in

sculpture by Rodin who started with his work on la Porte de l’Enfer , inspired by

Dante, as early as 1880.

 

Raoul Larche depicts his storm as the dynamic movement of a swirling wave,

carrying the bodies of four clouds, from which emerges a female figure in full

extension, embodying the storm, her mouth open in a powerful screech and her

arms outflung to destroy everything in her path.

 

 With the repletion of the faces and the similar bodies La Tempête et se Nuées

 also appears to be metamorphosis of a single woman, going through various

stages of tragedy and despair before rising from the turmoil a triumphant yet

tragic heroin.

 

Raoul Larche won the award for sculpture at the Salon for this monumental

work measuring over 3.50 meter high. The city of Paris commissioned a bronze

example in this size. It was exhibited in the Salon of 1899, and then the

Universal Exhibition of 1900 before entering the collections of the Petit-Palais.

During World War II, the original cast was destroyed and the bronze melted to

recover the metal.

 

After the success of the sculpture at the Salon, the artist decided to have the

model edited by Siot-Decauville, the dimension reduced to a quarter of the

exhibition plaster. The foundry offered the 85 cm high bronze for 3,000 francs,

making Larche the second on the list of most expensive sculptors in the edition

catalogues (the first being Jean-Léon Gérôme).

 

The price of the cast, the complexity of the model and the size of the sculpture

explain why the edition was limited to very few samples. The chef-modèle of

the Siot-Decauville foundry reappeared in 1993 and is now exhibited at the

Musée du Petit-Palais in Paris.

 

Siot-Decauville also offered the present smaller version, which is 61 cm high.

Our sample of this cast is a particularly fine and detailed example.

 

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