Modernist Exotic Wood and Brass Wading Bird Sculpture, French circa 1970

A striking modernist sculpture in the form of a tall wading bird, the body carved from a richly grained exotic hardwood of deep burgundy-brown tone and the head formed as a smooth polished brass ellipse, catching the light with the clarity of a burnished mirror. Two slender tapering legs of polished brass support the figure with the poise of a heron at rest, the whole composition reduced to its most essential geometry — the teardrop of the head, the smooth oval of the body, and the spare verticals of the legs — in a manner wholly characteristic of the best French decorative sculptors of the 1960s and 70s.

The contrast between materials is central to the piece’s appeal: the warm, dense grain of the wood plays against the cool brilliance of the brass in a dialogue that gives the bird both visual weight and airborne lightness simultaneously. At 59.5 centimetres tall, the sculpture has the commanding verticality of a real wading bird — a quality the maker has exploited to give even a modest table or console a focal point of quiet drama.

Such combinations of exotic hardwood and worked brass were a hallmark of the French decorative arts in the years following the war, when craftsmen sought to marry the warmth of natural materials with the prestige of non-ferrous metals. The simplified ornithological form — stylised to the point of near abstraction yet immediately recognisable as a bird — belongs to an aesthetic tradition reaching from Brancusi to the luxury object-makers of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

A restoration to the neck joint — the point where hardwood body meets brass head — has been competently carried out and does not affect the sculptural integrity of the piece. French craftwork, circa 1970.