Richard MacDonald

Gymnast Bust, Platinum

2006

First Ribbons draws on the artist's highly developed sensitivity for the experience of the dancer, and displays a personal moment of accomplishment. We witness the young dancer holdi...

The Anatomy of a Golfer l-V, Atelier is the first in Richard MacDonald's series of golfers that were inspired by the creation of his heroic sculpture, MOMENTUM, which marked the 100th Anniversary of the US Open Golf Tournament at the historic Pebble Beach Golf...

Conceived early in Richard MacDonald’s career, the ideas involving three carefree figures of seemingly enchanted origin continue to stir the artist’s imagination. “Joie de...

After devoting more than twenty years to the perfection of the human form in bronze, Richard MacDonald focused on a series of sculptures based on his work with dancers from the Royal...

Cloaked in mystery, the female form of “Nightfall” intrigues us. Concealed is a beautiful face, but like nightfall itself, all is not revealed. The globes in each hand suggest the ar...

Richard MacDonald’s “Cheetah, Bust” reveals an intimate study of “Samburu”, the two and a half year old Nambian cheetah the artist used as the subject for his “Diana and the Coursing...

This Sculpture is made by Dutch artist Antoinette Briet. Her forms always are an abstraction of movement in the world of animals. In this particular sculpture she shows here admirati...

Andries Velting is a new artist at Gallerie Bonnard. His moving sculptures of dancers are a special addition tot our existing collection. Velting says: "Ever since childhood I've be...

Facile 59 x 30 x 30 cm bronze Facile is a bronze sculpture by Italian contemporary artist Eva Steiner. In her work she focuses on the gracefulness of women. Her sculptures of bronz...

Bronze sculpture Edition of 35

Artificial stone & nickel bronze

Ferdinand Barbedienne (Saint-Martin-de-Fresnay 1810 – 1892 Paris) after Lorenzo Ghiberti (Florence, 1378 – 1455) Signed at the lower right of the principal relief: F. BARBEDIENNE Provenance: Private Collection, USA. Barbedienne’s “Gates of Paradise” reliefs are one of the triumphs of nineteenth-century bronze casting and patination. The nine panels that comprise our example are half-size reductions of the famous originals by Lorenzo Ghiberti, made for the Baptistery of Florence and now housed in the Museo del Opera del Duomo. Mounted in an impressive, mullioned frame surround, our work is an exceptional exemplar of the Renaissance Revival, the broadly influential style and movement that infused architecture, design, and artistic culture in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The central scene, The Story of Joseph, is perhaps the most celebrated of the entire series depicting as it does seven episodes from the Biblical narrative integrated into a single composition: Joseph cast by his brethren into the well, Joseph sold to the merchants, the merchants delivering Joseph to the pharaoh, Joseph interpreting the pharaoh’s dream, the pharaoh paying him honor, Jacob sending his sons to Egypt, and Joseph recognizes his brothers and returns home. The surrounding reliefs—two vertical figures in niches, two recumbent figures, and four portrait heads in roundels—are as well faithful reductions of Ghiberti’s original bronzes on other parts of the doors. The maker of these casts was the renowned 19th-century French fondeur Ferdinand Barbedienne. Gary Radke has recently written of this great enterprise: “The Parisian bronze caster Ferdinand Barbedienne began making half-sized copies of ancient and Renaissance sculpture in the 1830s. His firm benefitted enormously from the collaboration of Achille Collas, whom Meredith Shedd has shown was one of numerous pioneers in the mechanical reproduction of sculpture. Their competitors largely devoted themselves to reproducing relief sculpture, but Collas devised a process for creating fully three-dimensional copies. A tracing needle, powered by a treadle, moved over the surface of a full-sized plaster cast or bronze of the original and triggered a complementary action in a cutting stylus set over a soft plaster blank…He signed an exclusive contract with Barbedienne on November 29, 1838, and won medals for his inventions in 1839 and 1844. Barbedienne’s half-sized copies of the Gates of Paradise were famous not only for their fidelity to the original, but also for the way their gilding…suggested the glimmering surface that was hidden under centuries of dirt. Some critics even saw Collas’s and Barbedienne’s work as ‘philanthropic, an exemplary adaptation of industry to the requirements of art, the artist, the workers, and the public alike.’ At 25,000 francs, Collas’s and Barbedienne’s reduction of the Gates of Paradise was singularly more expensive than any other item for sale in their shop. All the reliefs, individual statuettes, and busts were cast separately and could be purchased either by the piece or as an ensemble. Fittingly, Barbedienne’s accomplishment earned him the Grand Prix at the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle, along with numerous other medals.” Three complete examples of the Barbedienne-Ghiberti doors are known. One, first installed in a chapel in the Villa Demidoff of San Donato near Pratolino, was later acquired by William Vanderbilt...