Jacques Louis Gautier – Mephistopheles
Many years ago, I came across this amazing bronze sculpture in a Los Angeles shop. Unfortunately, it was already sold and the owner was on his way to pick it up. Ever since, I’ve been looking for another opportunity to come face to face with Mephistopheles.

From Sotheby’s:
Gautier modelled this extraordinary figure of Mephistopheles in the early 1850′s and sent it for display at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Its idiosyncratic design proved a success and soon after the firm of Duplan et Salles began to cast the model in bronze. Busquet, a critic for the journal L’Artiste was moved to write ‘They have edited this strange Mephistopheles with a long and grimacing profile which one can see, not without some surprise, in the showrooms of the principal stores in Paris’. One customer was the Duchess of Alba, who acquired a cast for the cabinet of Napoleon III.














