David D'angers - Relief, Napoleón - 2.5 cm - Copper

French painting featuring a pressed copper profile of Napoleon, framed against a pistachio green velvet background. Dated from the late 19th century. It features marbled paper on the back, typical of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The signature on this pressed copper piece is due to the fact that these are exact mechanical reproductions of the original medallions created by David d'Angers. The sculptor engraved his signature in relief directly onto his original plaster or wax models in the 19th century. As the replicas were later produced using molds, the artist's signature was duplicated identically in the new material as a seal of authorship, not as a hand-drawn signature by him.