Head of a Sorcerer by Guillaume Laplagne (1870-1927), terra cotta print, signed Guillaume Laplagne, located Le caire, dated 1913.
Guillaume Laplagne, originally from Ervy in the Aube region, enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1894, where his teacher was Louis-Ernest Barrias. In 1899, he was hired by the Musée Grévin to model mannequins. He produced several satirical works, published in the magazine Guignol between 1900 and 1905.
He collaborated with Emile Decoeur, who published his Tête de Sorcier in stoneware around 1907, when Laplagne's bust was presented at the Salon des Artistes Français under the name of “Nègre”. The subject of this bust was further developed in “Le faune” or “Charmeur de serpents” in collaboration with Fernand Rumèbe (Jason Jacques Collection, New York). His fascination with Africa is paralleled by a series of busts produced at the end of his life, following the Croisière Noire and presented at the Louvre's Pavillon de Marsan, certainly based on photographs.
A meeting with Prince Youssef Kamal in Egypt, who commissioned his bust, was to prove decisive for the sculptor's career. In 1908, they came up with the idea of founding a School of Fine Arts in Cairo, modelled on the European model, which became the first school of its kind in the Arab world. Guillaume Laplagne became its director, naturally overseeing the sculpture section. Mahmoud Mokthar was one of the school's most brilliant pupils, and one of the most important exponents of twentieth-century Egyptian sculpture.
The bust we are presenting is dated 1913 and located in Cairo; it was therefore created during Laplagne's tenure as director of the Beaux-Arts in Cairo. Slight differences are perceptible between the stoneware edited by Decoeur and the terracotta presented here.
