-Attribuée à Julien Préhoust, Sainte Barbe, terre cuite polychrome, vers 1660, Préval, Église paroissiale Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul.
Full entry available upon request
The seventeenth century saw an extraordinary school of terracotta modellers emerge and flourish in Maine. While stone and woodwork predominated in the rest of France, from the end of the 16th century onwards the workshops in Le Mans became the preferred playground for modellers who, by combining Italian influences with local tradition, gave birth to totally original forms. Passionate study and patient assimilation of this rich artistic context have led Galerie Sismann to attribute this moving Virgin and Child to one of the most mysterious artists of this school: Julien Préhoust. It reveals all the aesthetic ambition and spiritual sensitivity of seventeenth century France, which offers us here an ardent testimony to the grace and elegance of Maine production at the dawn of the "Grand Siècle". In France, the sculptors of the first half of the 17th century, caught between the last fires of The School of Fountainebleau and the early flowering of the Versailles Court Art, are still too often overlooked. The contribution made by this discovery of the Galerie Sismann to our understanding of the French artistic landscape of the 17th century, and more specifically the work of Julien Préhoust, is an event in itself.
