page_title: Alexandre Bigot
section_title: Bigot and sculpture
hierarchical_section_title: Alexandre Bigot / Career in ceramics / Bigot and sculpture
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Vase boule en grès émaillé localisé au Musée des Arts et Métiers de Hambourg
context_page_description: Alexandre Bigot was a French ceramicist. He was primarily a ceramics manufacturer; producing the designs of many artists and architects of the French Art Nouveau movement; including: Jules Lavirotte, Hector Guimard, Louis Majorelle, Henri Sauvage, Henry van de Velde, Auguste Perret, Andre Arfvidson, Anatole de Baudot and more.
  Bigot was a physics and chemistry instructor who became interested in ceramics in 1889 after viewing Chinese porcelain at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. With his knowledge of chemistry, Bigot was able to create glazes with a large variety of colors and finishes.
  Bigot's firm was based at Rue des Petites Ecuries, Paris and he also created a ceramics factory in Mer in 1889 which employed as many as 150 people. Siegfried Bing, a German art dealer in Paris, displayed works by Bigot, among others, and was responsible for introducing the Art Nouveau style. Bigot’s Parisian firm closed in 1914 due to a decline in the popularity of Art Nouveau.
context_section_description: At the end of the nineteenth century, sculpture was dominated by an overarching interest in polychromy. Ceramic thus came to play a considerable role in the field, replacing faïence, as notably seen in the Salons of 1896, 1897, and 1899, which featured numerous works made of the material. Artists were enthusiastic about this turn, most notably Alexandre Falguière, who boasted about his work La Sortie de l'École ("Leaving the School"): "It's prodigious, you see, not a crack or a small deformation. That's my own work, as it left my hands, with the cuts made by my thumb and fewer by the cutting tool! And how beautiful is the bronze, more sincere, less sad and of a sweetness. The principal actors in this new development are the studios of Emile Muller and Alexandre Bigot and the greatest names in sculpture preach the technique: Falguière, Mercié, Coutan, Fagel, Marqueste, Boucher, Ringel, Injalbert, Roche, Bourdelle, Rodin..."
  We know little about the links between Rodin and Bigot. Rodin was very interested in ceramic and Japanese art, which he had pioneered in displays at Bing's shop and had worked on with the ceramicists such as Ernest Chapelet, Edomond Lachenal, Paul Jeaneney and Jean Carriès. Carriès was a mutual friend of Bigot and Rodin. A single letter signed by Bigot is conserved at the Musée Rodin and it consists simply of a note of congratulations on Bigot's part. It seems nonetheless that Rodin was well known by the Bigot family as eight cards were exchanged between them. While Rodin left no traces of his work with Bigot, however, the same could not be said of his student Antoine Bourdelle. the latter was extremely interested in the new developments in ceramic at the beginning of the century and created casts of his works in porcelain and in ceramic. For the ceramics, Bourdelle called on Bigot and cast his extant works with a series of works entitled Le Baiser (The Kiss), Aphrodite, and Sleeping Infant.
  Camille Alaphilippe, inspired by the possibilities of ceramics during his stay at the Villa Médicis in Rome in 1901, produced La Femme au Singe (Woman with Monkey) in 1908. It is composed of a daring assemblage of elements of gilded bronze (head and hands) and of plates of enameled ceramics, mounted on a wood and iron structure held together by a clay mortar, with the joints fabricated from colored plaster. It is likely that the work was executed in Bigot's studio as the signature is not evident, and moreover, Alaphilippe had already collaborated with Bigot on the Ceramic Hôtel in 1903 and he would assume control of A. Bigot & Cie in 1914.
caption: Alexandre Bigot, Vase, 1895, stoneware, acquired by Siegfried Bing in 1896, Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts.
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