Auguste Moreau (1834-1917) Woman With A Bird

A beautiful late 19th-century sculpture of a woman with a bird by Louis Auguste Moreau.
It rests on a red marble base.
Signed on the base, Auguste Moreau.
French work.

Circa 1890.

Dimensions:
Height with base: 69 cm.
Width: 34 cm.
Depth: 28 cm.

Biography of Auguste Moreau
Auguste Moreau belonged to the Moreau family, a dynasty of sculptors from the 19th and early 20th centuries. He was the son of Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Joseph Moreau and the younger brother of sculptors Hippolyte Moreau and Mathurin Moreau.

While his parents ran a café-guinguette, Le Salon de Mars, in Saint-Saulve, young Auguste was no different from the other village children and was an unremarkable schoolboy. He met Auguste Meurice, a decorative painter from Valenciennes who attended his parents' school, and they became friends. Through this association, he met several students from the Valenciennes Academy of Painting and, around the age of 16, enrolled at the Academy. He studied under Julien Poitier. He painted portraits of his family and friends, as well as villagers, which he managed to sell, initially at affordable prices and then at increasingly higher prices. He also received commissions for religious subjects for local churches. He honed his skills through practice and became a sought-after local painter. From 1872 onward, he submitted canvases to the Valenciennes Salon and was elected a member of the Valenciennes Society of Agriculture, Sciences, and Arts. In 1873, he made his first submission to the Paris Salon; he would subsequently exhibit there almost every year but never won a prize. Until 1880, he signed his paintings "Auguste Moreau," then added his wife's name, "Deschanvres," to avoid confusion with others of the same name. In 1902, he received a major commission for a series of portraits of the archbishops of Cambrai.

He was named a Pontifical Knight in the Order of St. Gregory the Great, undoubtedly in recognition of the numerous portraits he painted of dignitaries of the Catholic Church in northern France. A genre and portrait painter, Auguste Moreau-Deschanvres never left his native region, where he had found all his sources of inspiration. Shortly after his death, from March 23 to April 6, 1913, 150 paintings and drawings were exhibited in his studio and offered for sale.