François Pompon – Polar Bear Mug

François Pompon (1855–1933) spent more than four decades as an assistant and stone-carver in other sculptors' studios — working under Rodin for a significant period — before achieving his own recognition at the age of sixty-seven. The occasion was the 1922 Salon d'Automne, where Pompon exhibited a large plaster polar bear that stopped the exhibition in its tracks. The figure was unlike anything else on show: radically simplified, its surfaces swept clean of anecdotal detail, the animal's weight and movement suggested by the most economical of forms. It was immediately recognised as a masterpiece, and Pompon spent the remaining decade of his life executing it in various materials — marble, stone, bronze — for collectors and public collections across France.

The Ours blanc (Polar Bear) became one of the defining images of Art Deco sculpture, and Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann placed it at the centre of his celebrated pavilion at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris — the exhibition that gave the style its name. Pompon's achievement was to find, through reduction, something more truthful about the animal than any amount of surface naturalism could provide: the polar bear pacing, its head slightly lowered, entirely present, entirely itself.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

François Pompon, Ours blanc (Polar Bear), c. 1923. Public domain.