Polar Bear

In 1927 the polar bear that had made François Pompon famous five years earlier still existed only in plaster. The journalist Louise Weiss, who ran the Paris weekly L'Europe nouvelle, pressed the case with Édouard Herriot, then minister of education and fine arts, and the French State ordered the bear in stone for 25,000 francs. The banker and collector David David-Weill gave the block, a pale, fine-grained limestone known as Lens stone.

Pompon was 72 by then, and he supervised rather than carved. He touched up the old plaster to serve as the model, and the carver Jean-Joachim Supéry copied it into the stone in a workshop at Malakoff, just south of Paris, transferring its measurements point by point. The finished bear was delivered on 16 February 1929 and went straight to the Musée du Luxembourg, the State's museum of living artists. The signature cut into the left side of the plinth reads POMPON.