It may relate to Alaphilippe’s “La Consolation” of 1901, made during his time at the French Academy in Rome and which gained an honourable mention at the Salon. It is possible that the positive reception of the plaster study lead to the carving of a marble version just 2 years later.   

Camille Marie Paul Alaphilippe was born in Tours in 1874. At 20 he won 1st prize in his admission tests to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and joined the studio of Louis-Ernest Barrias, who had won the Prix de Rome in 1865.

By the time that Camille Alaphilippe won the same prize in 1898, artistic developments in France had largely succeeded in bringing about a new art world, where the “grand manner” was falling from fashion and where the state monopoly of the écoles and salon had given way to a looser network of private art schools and galleries.

This may explain, why despite being among the most promising sculptors of his generation, Alaphillipe returned from his academic sojourn in Rome to a career in the commercial arts. His affiliation to the ceramicist Alexandre Bigot accounts for the remarkable façade of the Céramic Hôtel in 1904, as well as the decoration of Felix Potin’s department store in the art nouveau style. “La Femme au singe”, a bronze and ceramic masterpiece of 1908 was acquired by the city of Paris. Larger marbles, such as “Mystères douloureux” (1905) or “Le Premier Miroir” were destined for ornamental gardens in Tours and Nantes.

Art Nouveau & WWI

In the years leading up to the First World War, Alaphilippe’s career came up against the swelling revanchism that suspected an official state sculptor of being a dangerous “Germanophile” when he wed Annie Avog in Dusseldorf in 1906. Consistent showings at the Salon from 1901 to 1905, gave way to a period of inactivity and to a withdrawal of state commissions that may have accounted for Alaphillippe’s decision to volunteer for battle in 1914 at the age of forty. 

Les Artistes de L'Algerie suggests that facing ill health and financial ruin after the war, he left for Algeria, where he became head of sculpture at the School of Fine Arts in Algiers. His later works, typically war memorials, were destroyed during the French expulsion from North Africa. One made for the town of Philippeville (now Skikda), was dismantled and taken back to France in 1962.

Alaphilippe’s bare-breasted “Victory” emerging from a ghostly mass of soldiers and corpses may serve as a monument to European Civilisation or perhaps for a career given to a style exhausted by the industrial slaughter of WWI. The sharp, economic lines of modernism would fare better in a bankrupt continent than the patient, time consuming ornamentation of the art nouveau.