| Bugatti, Rembrandt (1885-1916) , Italian sculptor of animals, son of the painter and furniture designer Carlo Bugatti, and younger brother of the car designer Ettore. Rembrandt Bugatti was born in Milan and studied there before moving to Paris in 1904. Already single-minded in his passion for animals, he was helped and advised there by Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, and spent much of his time sketching and modeling animals in the Jardin des Plantes. At an early age he began to exhibit his animal sculptures—in Milan, Turin, Venice, and Paris. In 1904 he met the bronze founder and gallery owner Adrien Hébrard, and almost all Bugatti’s work was cast by him thereafter. In 1907 he settled in Antwerp, continuing his animal studies from the life at the zoo there. Bugatti continued to exhibit regularly at the Salon de la Nationale and the Salon d’Automne in Paris and was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1911. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 he joined the Red Cross in Belgium but, much affected by the horrors of war, he soon returned to Paris, suffering a nervous breakdown. He never recovered his zest for work, and committed suicide in 1916. Bugatti’s work forms a bridge between the romantically literal sculptures of the earlier Animaliers (makers of animal sculptures in bronze) such as Antoine-Louis Barye, Christophe Fratin, Pierre Jules Mène, and Emmanuel Fremiet and those of the modern period. His impressionistic re-creations of wild animals capture their essential characteristics with a uniquely spontaneous vitality and with unsentimental affection. Most of his bronzes were issued in limited editions and are numbered; usually the signatures of both Bugatti and Hébrard appear on the bases. |
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