Charles Henri Joseph Cordier

Charles Henri Joseph Cordier (19 October 1827 - 30 May 1905) was a French sculptor of ethnographic subjects. He is known for his polychrome sculptures in the later realist phase of Orientalism.

Early life and education

Cordier was born in Cambrai, North of Paris in 1827.

Career In 1847, a meeting with Seïd Enkess, a former black slave who had become a model, determined the course of his career.

His first success was a bust in plaster of a Sudanese man "Saïd Abdullah of the Mayac, Kingdom of the Darfur" (Sudan), exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, the same year that slavery was abolished in all French colonies. It is now housed at The Walters Art Museum. In 1851, Queen Victoria bought a bronze of it at the Great Exhibition of London.

In 1851 he created “Bust of an African Woman" renamed "African Venus" by Théophile Gautier.

Cordier also depicted European types from different parts of France, Greece and Italy. His artistic credo was however in conscious opposition to the largely Eurocentric viewpoint prevailing in his day. In 1860 Cordier became a member of the Society of Anthropology of Paris,

Cordier took part in the great works commissioned by the Second French Empire (Paris Opera, Musée du Louvre, the Hôtel de Ville) or by illustrious patrons including Queen Victoria, Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie, Baron James de Rothschild, and the Marquess of Hertford.

From 1890 until his death in 1905 Cordier lived in Algiers, on the Westernized Rue de Tivoli.

In 2022, the curators of The Colour of Anxiety, an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, which shows two sculptures of Cordier (La femme africaine, 1857 and Venus africaine, 1899) have commented that " While white male sculptors such as John Bell and Charles Cordier intended to bring the pathos of the institution of slavery to public attention, yet they nonetheless traded on the allure of illicit sexuality born of that same system."