Postcard Raoul Larche La Tempête Petit Palais Paris

Sepia-toned postcard reproducing a photograph of Raoul Larche's sculpture La Tempête, published by Lévy et Neurdein Réunis in Paris and numbered 82 in the series Collections d'Art de la Ville de Paris. The photograph shows the monumental work installed in the galleries of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, the original name of the Petit Palais. The card is in good condition.

Raoul Larche (1860-1912) completed La Tempête et ses nuées as a plaster group for the Salon of 1896. The City of Paris acquired the work and commissioned a monumental bronze version over three and a half metres tall, presented at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 and subsequently installed in the Petit Palais. The composition depicts a naked, screaming female figure carried away by the storm above a sea of surging clouds, a high point of Larche's symbolist sensibility and early Art Nouveau vocabulary. The monumental bronze was melted down in 1942 to recover the metal and the original plaster disappeared in 1939; the card, published by Lévy et Neurdein Réunis between 1920 and 1932 from their workshops on rue Letellier, thus preserves the image of a lost work.