J'adore: French art deco bronze woman

The most beautiful woman in Paris is holding a tray. She has no name. She stands outside the entrance of a popular restaurant. The beautiful woman is holding an ashtray where smokers stub out their cigarettes before entering the restaurant. She is a bronze woman, a statue. She is probably French art deco or maybe art nouveaux.

The restaurant owner bought her in Morocco some years ago, and has no information about her. Perhaps he has forgotten his initial attraction to her and why he bought her. Today she is just an ashtray. He sees her everyday. Every night when the restaurant and bar close, she goes inside where she is safe.

The bronze statue is probably a replica of the work of Max Le Verrier (1891-1973). Louis Octave Maxime Le Verrier was born in Neuilly sur Seine where his father was a goldsmith and jeweller. His father wanted Max to become a farmer and disowned him when he practiced drawing and sculpting. When Max was eighteen he went to England and opened an aviation school with a friend.

Called into the military service, his plane was shot down in May 1915 and was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Munster. He received the Military Medal posthumously and the Croix de Guerre 1914-1918. After the war he studied at the Beaux Arts in Geneva.

He sculpted large and small images of women in bronze. Often he would include a lamp, with the woman holding a dome light. In 1925 he won a gold medal for his works during his “animal period” – creating lions, panthers, horses, gazelles, monkeys, squirrels, hippos, dogs, and birds – often in motion.

His success, he wrote, was due to his company’s secret metal formula, the “art cast” produced by Verrier. The metal, although not bronze, imitated a bronze appearance. He designed statues, lights, ashtrays, bookends and paperweights. His clean, slim, tapered lines are quite distinctive, but probably also replicable. Whether she is a Verrier, a Verrier replica, or something completely different, she is nevertheless fascinating and quite stunning – and would be quite at home in a scene from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.