Hébrard cast, numbered 3, bearing the stamp “CIRE PERDUE A.A. HÉBRARD”

“I look very much like an old marabou,” Rembrandt Bugatti wrote in a small undated notebook.

This sentence, of poignant sincerity, sheds light on the sculptor’s profound attachment to this solitary wading bird, which he regarded not as a mere animal subject but as a true alter ego. At the time, Bugatti was suffering from intense isolation, emotional estrangement from his family and loved ones, and a sense of confinement comparable to that of the migratory birds he observed in the narrow, ill-suited enclosures of the zoological gardens of Paris and Antwerp.

The marabou, a large scavenging stork, is an imposing yet marginal bird, often unloved, with a grave, almost melancholic appearance. Forced into immobility when captive, deprived of the space necessary for flight, it came to embody for Bugatti the condition of the sensitive being trapped in an existence that stifles vital impulse. Through this figure, the artist projects his own struggle to maintain inner balance, his fear of emotional and creative desiccation, and his battle with a solitude he himself described as a “solitude of the soul.”

This identification finds particularly explicit expression in an autobiographical drawing, often referred to as Self-Portrait with a Marabou, in which Bugatti depicts himself in profile facing a marabou constructed from elementary geometric volumes.

It is within this context that Bugatti modelled his marabou sculptures around 1907. He first created The Marabous, One Against the Other, a group imbued with empathy, celebrating the bond, attachment, and reciprocity between two living beings. By contrast, Marabou at Rest, the present work, embodies solitude that is accepted, almost internalized. The bird is shown motionless, its beak and long legs folded to form two parallel lines that merge into the dense mass of the body with closed wings. The radical synthesis of volumes, combined with a restrained and precise modelling of the plumage, lends the work a rare expressive intensity, further enhanced by the beautiful dark patina of this example.

Only ten casts of this model, published by Hébrard—the artist’s exclusive editor—between 1913 and 1934, have been recorded. Numbered 3, the present bronze is therefore among the very earliest casts and, according to family archives, was acquired directly from the foundry in 1922. In 1903, through the intermediary of his adoptive father René Dubois, Rembrandt Bugatti met Adrien Aurélien Hébrard, who placed him under contract. Together with his workshop foreman Albino Palazzolo, assisted by Marcello and Claude Valsuani, a close and friendly collaboration developed, resulting in magnificent lost-wax casts—an association that explains the dedication of one of Bugatti’s drawings to his friend, the founder Valsuani, who, like Bugatti himself, was of Italian origin.