Lot 37 Dα

This statue of “Pomona”, the Roman goddess of orchard fruit and the bountiful harvest, was one of the first standing figures by the French sculptor Aristide Maillol. Created around 1908/09, the initially nude “Pomona” is made a direct embodiment of fertility and ripeness through her softly modelled, ample forms and the apples she offers. Inspired by Greek statues Maillol had seen during his 1908 journey to Athens, Delphi and Olympia with his patron Harry Graf Kessler, he envisioned his “Pomona” in a classical contrapposto, with one leg bent at the knee and the other extended upright. A crown of flowers on her head completes her majestic appearance.
The creation of “Pomona” is closely connected with Maillol’s first prestigious commission: the decoration of the famous Russian collector Ivan Abramovich Morozov’s neo-classical music salon. Morozov had the painter Maurice Denis, a friend of Maillol’s, create a cycle of paintings featuring the story of Psyche. To complement them, he asked the up-and-coming sculptor for the four statues: “Pomona” and “Flora” as well as “Spring” and “Summer”. As an old photograph of the music salon demonstrates, the statues were complete around 1912. However, Maillol also exhibited the “Pomona” as an individual figure, for example, at Paris’s 1910 Salon d’Automne, where it received an enthusiastic reception and launched his career as one of France’s leading sculptors.
In the early 1920s Maillol – in keeping with his normal working practice – also returned to the model of “Pomona” to create variations on it. He interpreted it either with lowered arms or dressed in the gentle folds of a tunic, as in the case of the present version. Whatever her attributes, with his “Pomona”, Maillol has created a statue of timeless beauty that is exceptionally balanced and harmonious with regard to its proportions.