Marie Zimmermann Lioness Roman Bronze Works

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A stylish lioness bronze from the Art Deco period modeled with outstretched front paws designed by noted American metalsmith and … Read more A stylish lioness bronze from the Art Deco period modeled with outstretched front paws designed by noted American metalsmith and jeweler Marie Zimmermann (1879-1972) and cast by Roman Bronze Works of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This sculpture comes directly from the artist's estate and is illustrated on page 320, fig. 9.50 of The Jewelry and Metalwork of Marie Zimmermann, 2012. Very good condition with crisp details, marked Roman Bronze Works N.Y. on the back edge, measuring 8.13 in. Length x 4 in. Width x 2.75 in. Height.

Provenance: The Estate of Marie Zimmermann.

Over a 40 year career, Zimmermann designed imaginative and eclectic pieces reflecting her interests in historical design and the natural world. She modeled many of her initial designs in wax, a technique she learned at the Pratt Institute in New York at the beginning of her career. After receiving Zimmermann's wax model, Roman Bronze Works cast this piece using the lost wax (cire-perdu) process. Zimmermann used wax modeling and cast bronze techniques for a number of her larger-scale commissions, including funerary monuments but chose to work in copper, silver and gold for the majority of her smaller, tabletop creations. The lioness is one of only a handful of known examples of her work in bronze at this scale.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City holds the largest collection of objects by Marie Zimmermann, making their first acquisition in 1922. A variety of her designs in jewelry and metalwork are in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Edsel & Eleanor Ford House, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University and the Columbus Museum of Art. See less