Honoré de Balzac
Pierre-Eugène-Emile Hébert
French, 1828–1893

Details
Title
Honoré de Balzac
Artist/Maker
Pierre-Eugène-Emile Hébert (French, 1828–1893)
Date
1877
Medium
Terracotta
Dimensions
33 7/16 x 25 9/16 x 16 15/16 inches
Credit
Purchase with funds from Irene and Howard Stein
Accession #
2006.19
Pierre-Eugène-Émile Hébert specialized in memorial sculptures and portraits of great men. Throughout a successful career, Hébert exhibited at the Salon many times until his death in 1893. Remarkable for its grand dimensions, this terra-cotta portrait pays homage to Honoré de Balzac’s immense literary prestige and physical presence. Hébert cleverly combined a monumental quality with a sense of the sitter’s intellectual agility—a sharp sideways glance and faint smile express the character of this writer, an ironic observer of his contemporaries.
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