This terracotta featuring an old man in deep thought and slumped in an armchair belonged in the collection of Joseph Alberdingk Thijm (1820-1889), a prominent champion of Catholic thought and a professor of aesthetics and art history at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In the sale catalogue of his estate the work was called Méditation and described as Vieillard assis dans un fauteuil (‘Old man sitting in an armchair’). The man is clad in nineteenth-century, indoor dress: a dressing gown with lapels, tight-fitting breeches, stockings and slippers. In view of the man’s pensive pose, with one hand at his mouth and holding in his other hand a treatise, this could have been a particular philosopher or else a personification of philosophy.
The piece was once sold at auction as a work by the well-known sculptor Louis Royer (1793-1868), whose foster daughter married Alberdingk Thijm in 1846. The same type of man is depicted in a second terracotta in Alberdingk Thijm’s collection of ‘Royer-sculptures’ entitled At Mother’s Grave (BK-NM-8976). The man featured in that work is younger, but the figure is so akin to the present piece in style and workmanship that it was undoubtedly made by the same sculptor. Although Royer created many, more or less similar compositions in this style and Alberdingk Thijm had also collected some of them, the initials ‘CH’ (or ‘GH’) on the reverse of the second figure are not Royer’s. Yet there is no other known Dutch sculptor at that time with those initials who is better eligible for authorship. It is quite possible that they do not relate to the maker’s name, but for example to the first owner of the piece.
Bieke van der Mark, 2026
