Bust of Saïd Abdullah of the Darfour People

This naturalistic yet idealized likeness depicts a formerly enslaved Sudanese man, Saïd Abdullah, who visited Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier in his Paris studio. It reflects the 19th-century fascination with non-European costumes, customs, and physiognomies, called Orientalism, as well as the burgeoning field of anthropology. A plaster cast of this bust was Cordier’s first entry to the Paris Salon, in 1848, and one of the few sculpted images of Black figures shown publicly up to that point. The air of nobility this figure projects may reflect opposition to the practice of slavery, which had been abolished in the French colonies that same year.