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Fisher-boy Dancing the Tarantella (Souvenir of Naples) is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Description
Fisher-boy Dancing the Tarantella (Souvenir of Naples) (1833) is a bronze by the French sculptor Francisque-Joseph Duret (1804–65). The sculpture depicts an Italian youth dressed in contemporary clothing and engaged in a popular dance, clicking his castanets in time with a South Italian folk song. He has been caught in a sprightly leap, gracefully balanced on his right foot.

Historical information
The Fish-boy represents the changing artistic sentiment of the early 19th century, from the Neoclassical to the Romantic. Neoclassical conventions demanded the adherence to an ideal beauty expressed through: classical proportions, the nude, a decorous pose, and a noble subject matter. The Fisher-boy’s shorts, dangling jewelry, and jaunty cap, flew in the face of these classical values. When the sculpture appeared for the first time in the 1833 Paris Salon, the artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, by this time a clear authority on Neoclassical French painting, expressed his distaste of the clothed youth. Other critics claimed the boy was too skinny, lacking the muscular beauty of the classic nude.

Despite the sculpture’s critical reception, it quickly established Duret as an important part of a new direction in sculpture and French art. In the early 1830s, the timeless idealism and moralizing narratives to which Neoclassical works aspired, had started to be replaced with the allure of contemporary pleasures and the exotic. Inspired by movements in South Italy, French artists made new associations between the ancient past and its modern echoes. Instead of approaching antiquity with an educational purpose, they sought to express a longing for a distant time and place, one that was shrouded in mystery and that could be both real or imagined, far away or long ago.

Duret spent a considerable amount of time in Italy, upon his completion of four years of studies at the Villa Medici, the French school in Rome. Indeed, Duret’s fisher-boy appeared to be taken directly from the streets of Naples. The Fisher-boy embodies a new subject matter, influenced by popular Italian culture, but it is still anchored by a sense of classical poses and proportions. Duret most likely derived the raised leg and arms of the Fisher-boy from two Hellenistic sculptures that were well known through copies and engravings in the early 19th century, in an attempt to capitalize on their popularity and fame.

The Fisher-boy’s influence is evident in works such as The Dance (1865), by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–75), a monumental work commissioned for the façade of the Paris Opera House, and it’s smaller variant The Three Graces. Here, the pose of one of the dancing girls clearly echoes that of the Fisher-boy.

Acquisition
This work was purchased with donations from AGO Members and Friends, 1990.