Description
Ségoffin seems to have drawn inspiration for his Evil Genius from Romantic sculpture, particularly from Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1807-1857) in his famous Satan (1834) or his Evil Genius, “a terracotta group for a console” (1853). These representations all reflect a taste for the damned, the vanquished and the desperate, a taste rooted in literature, including Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faust, and Dante’s Inferno.
This Evil Genius also presents a superb study of the back (a muscular and knotted back) and a very expressive face which reinforce its fantastic aspect and which Michelangelo and Rodin would not have disowned.
