The Wounded Man

Jef Lambeaux, an accomplished sculptor with a romantic side, infused his work with a certain amount of modernity. His renown is owed to the production and sales of small versions of his works: these “reductions” gradually became an essential addition to every bourgeois interior, establishing him as a prominent figure of Belgian art. This sculpture falls within a long iconographic tradition, from the Dying Galatian of antiquity to the Tarcisius, Christian Martyr of the nineteenth-century French artist Alexandre Falguière. The expression of physical suffering seen here is particularly reflective of the style of Auguste Rodin, Lambeaux’s contemporary. The same passion drove the two powerful modellers, who introduced a type of expressionism to sculpture.