Victorien Antoine Basset

VICTORIEN ANTOINE BASTET (France, 1852-1905).
"Bacchante.
Terracotta.
Signed on the base.
Size: 58 x 42 x 23 cm.
Round sculpture in which the author presents the bust of a woman who turns her face slightly avoiding the spectator's gaze. The lady, with a complacent and happy gesture, is also dressed with vine leaves, which indicates that it is very likely that it is the representation of a bacchante. A woman belonging to the cult of the god Bacchus, the god of wine, known for their erotic dances, completely naked and immersed in a kind of orgiastic ecstasy. During the 19th century, the representation of the Bacchantes became popular, not only for the fact of showing the eroticism produced by a woman's body, but also because there was a whole debate about the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
Victorien Bastet worked on his parents' farm in his youth. Later, in 1871, he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Avignon. Having obtained a scholarship, he went to Paris to be admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. From the city. But during his military service in Béziers where he met a rich merchant, Joseph Vallarino, who became his patron. Bastet became a hemiplegic in 1902 and died on 5 March 1905. Jules Belleudy, writer, journalist and prefect, wrote: "If his limbs were paralysed, his brain remained intact and he was able to see men who have the reputation, in the world, of being patrons, haggle over works and take advantage of his agony to take them from him at a low price; he fell prey to the Thénardiers of art".