The Arab knight (Guillemin)

The Arab knight or Le Chevalier guerrier arabe à cheval is a sculpture bronze equestrian statuette made in 1884 by Émile-Coriolan Guillemin and Alfred Barye.
History.
Creation.
Guillemin's Arabian Knight, for its beauty and notoriety, saw many non-original copies, both made at the time, in the 1800s, and low-value reproductions and counterfeits, sometimes made in Asia. The original version of the Arab Knight made in France, original of the time, is on the contrary of great historical and artistic value and inestimable.
Description.
The work depicts an Arab horseman returning from hunting, a duck and a gazelle clinging to his chair, a rifle slung over his shoulder. It is signed “E. Guillemin and Barye Fils”.
Exhibitions.
It was exhibited at the Salon in the Louvre in 1884.
Art market.
At a Sotheby's auction in New York in 2008, "Femme Kabyle d'Algerie and Janissaire du Sultan Mahmoud II|Femme Kabyle d'Algerie and Janissaire du Sultan Mahmoud II de Guillemin" (1967), bronze, by Emile Guillemin was sold for 1,202,500 euros plus auction fees.
Styling.
The composition of the bronze horse "Arab Rider" was created on the basis of the naturalist movement. The statue is the most important of the so-called "Belle Epoque" in France. The bronze horse is plastic and elegant, with an extraordinary anatomical study showing it in the position in which it finds itself, with the left front leg elegantly raised, where the base of the muscles is stretched and contracted in action. No less important is the delicate sculpture of his heroic knight in which it is necessary to emphasize the incredible precision of the representation of the face, which is accompanied by the movement of the body on the horse.
Orientalism is the Western fascination with exotic continents that became popular during the second half of the XIX century. Romantic portraits of African countries in contemporary literature and art, such as L'Africaine and Aida, foster this exoticism in European art. In the United States, the 1876 "Turkish Bazaar" at the Philadelphia Century Exhibition further increased its appeal with the "Turkish" or "Moorish" theme that persisted until the 1880s. Artists breaking away from the extreme monochrome of the Neoclassicism; making use of various bronzes, marbles, onyx and colored stones dipped in gold and silver, enriching the works of art, while maintaining a great interest in the ethnography of his material.