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Félix Maurice Charpentier
(1858-1924)
L’Improvisateur
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Biography
Few details of the life of Charpentier are published. He began to model figures from backyard clay at the age of seven, studied with the sculptor Armand in Avignon, and moved to Paris in 1877. He studied under Pierre Cavelier and Amédée Doublemard at the Ècole des Beaux-Arts in the 1880s and began to exhibit at the Paris Salon in either 1882 or 1884. His form was admired for both its force of expression and for its beauty and grace. He exhibited several allegorical figures at the Salon in the 1880s, including the Muse, an edition of which is in the Metz Collection.
--Indiana University Art Museum: Dr. Arthur R. Metz and His Collection


This statue is the inspiration for my story Being, which contains some mild sexual references.
It depicts a youth or faun playing a crude flute that he has improvised from a tree branch. The black and white pictures have been cleaned up from faded antique sepia photos on the net, and depict the original marble and bronze versions. If anyone knows where I can find more pictures of the original nude versions please let me know. As you can see from the other images, when the statue was reproduced in miniature it suffered the same kind of pointless censorship that many 19th-century statuettes were subjected to, proving that even the French could sometimes be prudish - at least about front views!

You might be interested to know that there is an official Félix Charpentier website, which contains some images of his works, but at disappointingly low resolution.

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