The Monster's Bride: Part Two

Emmanuel Frémiet - Gorille enlevant une negresse (1887)

"The 'Gorilla wars' of the 1860s and the entire weight of evolutionary debate attendant upon the theories of Darwin, Huxley and others lay behind Emmanuel Frémiet’s decision to revisit the gorilla in 1887. As Bartlett recounted in 1891:

Always seeing a plaster cast of a gorilla at the Garden [the Jardin des Plantes of the Museum] and regretting the destruction of the one he had made in 1859, decided Frémiet to make another group of the same subject, but differently and more compactly treated. Its appearance in the Salon of 1887 created an immense sensation and, as usual, a wide division of opinion. The few best artists and art lovers pronounced it, independent of subject, a great masterpiece, while many wholly condemned it, because of its subject.

Frémiet’s life and career had also changed significantly in the three decades that lay between his first and second versions of the Gorilla. From the 1860s Frémiet had become fascinated with creating meticulously accurate reconstructions of the appearance and armour of military figures from Roman times to the Middle Ages. His St George and the Dragon 1891, for example, casts the Christian saint in the guise of a medieval warrior, whose armour is based on actual examples of the period that the artist studied in France's Imperial Army Museum. A deep interest in the sciences of prehistoric archaeology and palaeontology also ran alongside Frémiet’s fascination for medieval reconstructions, leading him to create a number of sculptures depicting the struggles of Stone Age peoples. In July 1875, a month after the death of the esteemed animalier sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, Frémiet was named as Barye's replacement to the post of Master of Zoological Drawing at the Museum d'histoire naturelle.

When Frémiet created the 1887 version of the life-size Gorille enlevant une femme (Gorilla carrying off a woman), it carried the same power to shock audiences as its predecessor of 1859. The immediacy and solidity of its depiction of a wounded primate locked in mortal combat with a living, struggling woman was far removed from the passivity of even the best taxidermists' efforts then on display in the world's museums. While gorillas had by now become familiarised within both scientific and public discourse, living specimens of the great ape were still highly prized and exotic items for those zoos lucky enough to possess one. The life-size Gorilla carrying off a woman was another controversial triumph for Frémiet, who had last received a medal at the Salon in 1851. He now carried off the Salon's coveted prize, the Medal of Honour.

Whereas the 1859 sculpture had depicted a female gorilla dragging away an arguably 'naturally selected' dead trophy, Frémiet upped the ante in 1887. The woman was now Caucasian and very much alive, even presaging an art nouveau nymph in her curvaceous struggle with a visibly male primate. Frémiet no longer made his viewers play mute witness to the triumphant swagger of a murderous beast, but took them right into the heart of a much more ambiguous battle, set in the Stone Age.

The 1887 sculpture further muddied the waters by alluding to controversial new archaeological discoveries. Rather than being an innocent victim, the woman wears part of a gorilla's jawbone as a hair adornment, indicating her status as a Stone Age predator. She is part of a prehistoric hunting party that has been attacking the gorilla as edible prey. Moreover, it is her companions at whom the beast grimaces and snarls - those who have hurled the lance that pierces the left shoulder of the gorilla. The chiselled rock which the ape grabs in self-defence might well have belonged to his attackers, for it resembles a cutting tool from the Palaeolithic era."

From Clutch of the Beast by Ted Gott