The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception
Simon Challe (1719-1765) · 1764
A young veiled woman stands with her arms crossed tightly over her breast, her head bowed, her whole body wrapped in a long mantle whose folds swirl around her feet as if caught in a breeze. There is no crescent moon or serpent, none of the usual apparatus of the Immaculate Conception; the sculptor expresses Mary's purity through the gesture of humility alone, and through the untouched whiteness of the marble. The Latin words on the plinth, Virgo Virginum, Virgin of Virgins, are followed by the signature and date, Challe 1764. The statue is small, only seventy-five centimetres high, and was made for private devotion in a convent.
Simon Challe, a Parisian sculptor who had trained in Rome, made it for the nuns of the Visitation-Sainte-Marie in the rue des Fosses-Saint-Jacques in Paris. When the convents were closed at the Revolution the statue went to Alexandre Lenoir's Museum of French Monuments in 1794, after which it disappeared into private hands. It resurfaced on the art market and the Louvre bought it in 2011, a rare signed and dated work by a sculptor who died young and left few pieces.
Did You Know? The statue vanished from public view after 1794 and only came back to light more than two centuries later.
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