Antonio Frilli

ANTONIO FRILLI (Italy, active 1860-1902).
"Nymph", Florence.
Alabaster.
Signed and located.
Measurements: 41 x 27 x 14 cm (sculpture); 108 x 24 x 24 x 24 cm (column).

A nymph or fairy of nature is the protagonist of this sculpture, which is deduced from the flowers that adorn her ethereal clothes, as well as her hair loose but adorned with a fine ribbon. The woman, of delicate and melancholic forms, stands in the center of a tall cylindrical column with an octagonal base. The delicate floating forms of the sculpture allow us to link it to the Art Nouveau movement, which had in nature and in popular mythology, populated by fairies, elves and nymphs, two of its main sources of inspiration.

Antonio Frilli was a Florentine sculptor who specialized in marble and alabaster statues. In 1883, Frilli established his first workshop in via dei Fossi, Florence, where he worked with a few assistants on refined medium-sized painted alabaster and large white Carrara marble statues for private villas and monumental cemeteries. His works decorate famous cemeteries such as Porte Sante and Allori in Florence. After his death, a marble portrait of Frilli was carved in his workshop and placed on his family tomb in the Cimitero degli Allori. Frilli and his gallery were well known in Europe, the United States and Australia, as he participated in several world's fair exhibitions. He was in Philadelphia for the Centennial Exposition of 1876, and in 1881 his statues and garden furniture were exhibited at the Italian Pavilion in Melbourne, Australia. In 1904, two years after Frilli's death, his son Umberto participated in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (Missouri), where one of his father's works - a sculpture of a "Woman in a Hammock" in white Carrara marble - won the Grand Prix and 6 gold medals. In 1999, the same masterpiece was sold by Sotheby's with an auction estimate of $800,000. More recently, Frilli's 1892 sculpture "Sweet Dreams," featuring a life-size reclining nude in a hammock and exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915, sold at a Los Angeles auction house. A 2013 novel by Gary Rinehart, "Nude Sleeping in a Hammock," is a fictionalized account of the statue's owners since 1892 and how the sculpture affected their fortunes.