Portrait of Amédée Servin

On 2 October 1887, three years after the death of Amédée Servin, a monument was raised in the centre of Villiers-sur-Morin. Erected by public subscription, this obelisk designed by the sculptor Legrain serves both as a cenotaph and as a public fountain. At its top, Alexandre Falguière placed a bronze medallion: the portrait of the man known as “the master of the Morin valley”, founder of the Cercle artistique in 1860.

This is not an idealised effigy in the codes of heroic statuary, but a face caught in the density of its physical presence. The bronze, with its verdigris patina, bears the marks of the weather: the work exists not in the abstraction of the museum but in the real duration of a monument exposed to the elements, subject to the same cycle of seasons as the landscapes Servin painted.