Art Minutes: "La Fourmi" by Albert Ernest Carrier-Belleuse

Hello and welcome to Art Minutes. I'm Patricia Tomlinson, curator at the Appleton Museum of Art. Today I would like to introduce you to one of our 3D objects. It is a bronze statue by Albert-Ernst Carrier-Belluz, a French artist, and it was made around 1850. It is called the La Formie, which is the ant. When we look a little bit closer at this object, we see it is a young woman, and she is dressed in pseudo-Roman clothing. It's not accurate, but I think it's meant to look older, ancient, or even possibly medieval. It's very drapey and toga-like, and then she's also holding something very interesting in her hand, and her posture is intriguing as well, and I want to talk about that a little bit. When we look more closely at what she is holding, it is a distaff, and what a distaff is, is a stick-like implement that one would wrap either sheep's wool, long fibers of sheep's wool, or long fibers of flax, in order to use that to spin it into yarn or thread for textile production. When we zoom back out and look at the young woman's posture, once again you see the distaff in her left hand. There would have been a thread of fiber crossing in front of her body to her right hand, and then she would have had the drop spindle whorl hanging below that's doing the twisting to produce the yarn or thread. Now of course you have to see all of this in your mind's eye, because Carrier Ballou's did not include those details in this particular sculpture. It's also important to remember that this was created in the 1800s, and especially amongst rural people, spinning was still going on. Now granted it may not have been with a drop spindle, it probably was more likely with a spinning wheel, but spinning as a concept, as something that one does, was not completely foreign to people of this time period, especially if you were traveling out in the rural areas and seeing people that were still actively doing it. As I mentioned earlier, the title of this piece is very intriguing. It is La Femme, which means the ant in English, and it most likely refers to the biblical verse of Proverbs chapter six, verses six through eight, that speaks about the wisdom and industriousness of ants to provide for their families. And once again this was created in the 1800s, and the mores of the day were that young women should be humble, modest, industrious, help provide for their family, and all of these things working together lead us to the conclusion that the ant is referring to that particular biblical verse. Also when we look at the young woman's face, it is very serious, she is very focused on her task, which once again plays into the concepts of industriousness, modesty, humility, and all the things that made a woman exemplary in the 1800s. Thank you for watching, and I look forward to sharing more Art Minutes with you soon. Make sure you follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.