“L’enfant Au Coq” Translated “Boy with Rooster ” by Adriano Cecioni

A highly amusing bronze statue of a young boy standing and desperately holding a tethered rooster with wildly flapping wings in his arms. The boy is presumably in a farmers’ market and his expression shows him screaming at the top of his lungs trying to sell the rooster. The boy is leaning against a standing wooden wheelbarrow he used to bring the rooster to market. The bronze was executed by Italian 19thC Florentine artist Adriano Cecioni. The bronze is signed Adriano Cecioni on the base. There are no visible foundry marks however.

Adriano Cecioni was born in Florence in 1836 into a middle-class family belonging to the local gentry. He began his artistic training in 1859 at the Florentine Academy under the sculptor Aristodemo Costoli. In 1860 he participated in a competition to provide military artworks for the Tuscan government. His submission, a maquette for a statue of Charles Albert of Savoy, won a prize but was deemed unsatisfactory by academicians and was not commissioned In 1863 Cecioni received a grant and went to Naples, where he was instrumental in the formation of the artists’ group Scuola di Resina. A major work of this period was his sculpture The Suicide, which he exhibited at the Florence Academy in 1867. In 1872 Cecioni spent six months in London, where he contributed a series of caricatures to Vanity Fair magazine. After he returned to Italy, the sculptures he produced for the rest of his career were mainly genre works, often humorous in nature such as “L’Enfant Au Coq” offered here. He died in Italy in 1886.

His work is in some very serious Italian collections including Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Palazzo Pitti, Florence; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte moderna, Rome; Museo statale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna, Arezzo; and Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

Dimensions: 28″H (71cm) x 12″W (30cm) x 9″D (23cm)

Ref: NI CE03564