“RECLINING NUDE” or “NU COUCHE”
Lost-wax casting in translucid white glass
Signed indiscriminately
Height: 11 cm.
Length: 28 cm.
A signed and identical example in bronze was sold at Sotheby’s in New York, June 12, 1992, lot n. 11
Léopold Bernhard Bernstamm was born in Riga, now Latvia, where he entered the studio of Prof. David Jensen at age 13, and at 14 entered the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Petersburg, where he won several awards
In the early 1880s he made about thirty busts of celebrated Russians including Fyodor Dostoyevsky (from a death mask, 1881), Denis Fonvizin, Aleksandr Ostrovsky (for the foyer of the Alexandrinsky Theater), and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (erected at the writer’s grave in 1900). These busts established his reputation. He then spent 1884 in Rome and Florence, continuing his studies under a Professor Rivalti
In 1885 he settled in Paris, often returning to Saint Petersburg. His sculptures of eminent Frenchmen soon made him famous, including portraits of François Coppée, Paul Déroulède, Gustave Flaubert, Ludovic Halévy, Ernest Renan, Victorien Sardou, Émile Zola, and Jean-Léon Gérôme. He also made portraits of Czar Nicholas II of Russia and members of the Imperial family (1896), Anton Rubinstein (1901), and Alexander Pushkin (1911)
Thanks to his rapidity of execution and his sense of the physiognomy, he became chief sculptor of the museum Grévin for which he modeled effigies of numerous wax models
His last work for Saint Petersburg was the bust of Czar Alexander III of Russia (erected in the Russian Museum garden, removed in 1918). All told, he sculpted approximately 300 portraits of Russian and European representatives of culture, science and politics, and sculpted some monuments. Bernstamm was made chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1891
