Arthur Rimbaud, Poet as Paris Communard - (first casting)

SEE NOTE BELOW re: DISCOUNT PRICING.
Arthur Rimbaud is the enigmatic youth who changed the face of poetry ....well, perhaps I should add a youthful Walt Whitman to the collection, for between their two faces modern poetry in the Western World became quite a different artifact of human consciousness than previous. I would probably never have thought of him until commissioned by a young Texan named Austin Dallas, or perhaps it is Dallas Houston or Austin Houston but certainly not Galveston Houston...whom I believe is quite along the lines of Monsieur Rimbaud to whom I'm quite grateful---the French poet and not the Texan pictured here as a Paris Communard at the Place Vendome, Rue de la Paix (Peace Street) contemplating hope, hell, ego, boredom, ecstasy and existence without end (all of this of course engraved around the base in French, where it is more poetic). I should also not have even tried sculpting him from the single photo available of him at age 18 (and a painting of him in a cafe by Courbet mooning at his friend and then-partner Verlaine) were it not for a recent tentative discovery this past spring of a photo of him Zouave outfit having just toppled the statue of Napoleon in the Place du Vendome at the head of Peace Street in Paris. Suddenly, my own youthful revolutionary ardour was reawakened and I just HAD to memorialize his poetic struggle with life at the tail end.

THIS IS THE FIRST CAST of this piece. It is imperfect, as I did not fully understand the behavior of my mold. It is signed and labeled as such on the bottom. I struggled mightily to make this piece look presentable, and it IS... though it looks like it's been knocking around since 1871. The price is discounted for that reason...it seemed a shame to let a statue of this sort go to waste. So I put it in my garden. If you want him weathered, as is, or with a new patina applied on him, the price is the same.