Lot 102 R

„The eunuchs of the former Imperial Palace were precisely the sort of outcast group that excited Cartier-Bresson’s curiosity. […] One of these eunuchs was immortalized in a portrait. We see him standing below the ornamental coping of what might be the temple’s retaining wall, obsequious, epicene, his pointed ears just touching his skullcap. Apparently about to move out of the frame, he pauses, as if in a vision. Yet, surrounded though he is by a Surrealist scenography of sharply receding walls and the shadows of unseen objects, he is more than a theatrical ‘type’, a scrawled chorus figure in a costume sketch: he is an individual, thou as such absolutely unknowable.” (quoted from: Dan Hofstadter, Temperaments. Memoirs of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Other Artists, New York 2015, p. 68)