Rembrandt Bugatti
We present today's sculpture thanks to the Städel Museum in Frankfurt where you can again visit the En passant. Impressionism in sculpture exhibition.
The animal sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti was the son of a family of artists in Milan. His father Carlo was a designer, his uncle Giovanni Segantini a painter, and his brother Ettore later became an automobile designer. The sculptor Paolo Troubetzkoy was a close friend of the family. Rembrandt Bugatti never had academic training. In 1901, at the young age of 16, he presented a depiction of several cows at the spring exhibition in Milan. In 1903 his works were on display at the Venice Biennale. Shortly thereafter the family moved to Paris, where Bugatti caught the attention of the bronze founder and art dealer Adrien-Aurélien Hébrard. It was on Hébrard’s business premises that the artist had his first solo exhibition in 1904. He presented works at the Paris Salon and the gallery of Alberto Grubicy in Milan the same year. Bugatti executed most of his oeuvre, some 300 sculptures, in Antwerp—particularly at the city’s zoo—between 1906 and 1914. In January 1916, Bugatti took his own life in his Parisian studio. The start of the war in 1914 caused him to suffer from depression, and his condition worsened when the Antwerp zoo had to put down many of his beloved animals, because of the war.
P.S. Cows made its way to art already a few centuries ago. Read here why Dutch painters loved cows. : ))