Jean Carries

Jean-Joseph Carriès was sent to an orphanage at the age of six and at thirteen years of age was put working in a sculptor's studio, creating religious images. He was granted probationary acceptance into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1874 but failed to pass the admittance exam due to poor attendance. Despite this, Carriès first exhibited at the Paris Salon a year later and his Velasquez and Hals inspired sculptural portraits became progressively recognized by critics in the early 1880s. He worked mostly in bronze and produced historical representations of portraits but his greatest contribution to fin-de-siècle art was his work in the medium of enameled stoneware. Carriès interest in enameled stoneware and ceramics originated at the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle, where he saw examples of Japanese works in the medium. This new interest was fostered through his acquaintance with Gauguin and by the autumn of 1888, Carriès had gained a degree of financial independence that permitted him to devote himself to perrfecting the complicated firing process of ceramic stoneware. He became skilled at developing various enamel glazes which he applied to stoneware versions of his earlier, realist portraits as well as to a growing repetoire of fantastic and grotesque masks, self-portraits and animals, inspired by Gothic sculpture and Japanese art. It was through the latter two influences that Carriès's extreme realism led to distortion, caricature and finally to the grotesque - all of which prepared the way for the disfigurement of sculpture by artists in the early twentieth century.