Bust of Saïd Abdullah of the Darfour People
Medium
Bronze
Dimensions
82.5 × 45.7 × 35.6 cm (32 1/2 × 18 × 14 1/16 in.)
Classification
bust/head
Department
Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
18751
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
This naturalistic yet idealized likeness depicts a formerly enslaved Sudanese man, Saïd Abdullah, who visited Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier in his Paris studio. It reflects the 19th-century fascination with non-European costumes, customs, and physiognomies, called Orientalism, as well as the burgeoning field of anthropology. A plaster cast of this bust was Cordier’s first entry to the Paris Salon, in 1848, and one of the few sculpted images of Black figures shown publicly up to that point. The ai...