Rating and value of sculptures and bronzes by Jean Joachim

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Rating and value of the artist Jean Joachim     

Jean Joachim is an animal sculptor who is fairly well known to fans of this type of work. He doesn't have a strong presence on the art market, but his works are enjoying growing success.

His legacy therefore consists mainly of sculptures made from several types of material, especially bronze. At present, the prices of his works are rising recurrently at the auctioneers' gavel.

His sculptures are prized above all by European buyers, and the price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €20 to €620,000, a considerable delta, which speaks volumes, however, about the value that can be attributed to Jean Joachim's works.

In 2025, one of his marble sculptures, Le Pélican, dating from 1935, sold for €20,500 while it was estimated at between €5,000 and €8 000.

Order of value from a simple work to the most prestigious

Style and technique by artist Jean Joachim

In Jean Joachim's sculpture, modeling retains this property of suggesting weight, mass, anchoring to the ground.

But it's at the cost of a shift: he no longer seeks to reproduce the animal in its anatomical truth, he extracts from it a presence, a tension condensed into volume.

The line disappears, but what remains are broken surfaces, matt angles, planes that fit together without seeking fluidity. Bronze, often patinated in dark tones, does not smooth the form, but makes it vibrate, retaining it in a deliberately restrained density.

In his felines, bulls or horses (fig. 1), posture dominates over detail: no coat, no visible muscle, but a general balance, a taut structure, a movement frozen in the moment.

The base doesn't carry the animal, it extends it. The void around it becomes an extension of the mass. So, stripped of all anecdote, removed from the picturesque, Jean Joachim's sculpture closes in on the essential: a form, a gesture, a silent energy, offered to light as to matter.

The life of Jean Joachim

In Jean Joachim's career, classical training retains this function of mastering volume, of paying attention to structure.

This requires some changes: it doesn't lead to an academicism of representation, it opens up to a reflection on simplification, on the essential.

Born in 1905, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he initially followed the tradition of figurative sculpture, before devoting himself almost exclusively to the animal.

He quickly abandoned anecdotal detail in favor of compact form, taut line and inner balance. From the 1930s onwards, he exhibited regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français, where his works attracted attention for their restraint and restrained strength.

This gradual stripping down of detail became more pronounced over the decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, his animal bronzes - lions, horses, birds - imposed a synthetic, almost architectonic vision of the animal body. Nature, for him, is not imitated, it is constructed.

In contrast to naturalism, he favors the tension of form over descriptive precision. Thus, removed from the meticulous realism to which it seemed promised, his sculpture moves towards a more interior, more stable truth.

Until his death in 1990, Jean Joachim pursued this search for the right balance, for a silent density, which places his work in a discreet but lasting filiation, on the borders of classicism and abstraction.

Focus on Panthère marchant, Jean Joachim

In Panthère marchant (fig. 1), a bronze sculpture, Jean Joachim retains the silent frontality characteristic of his bestiary, the animal advancing at a slow pace, its body collected, taut.

But here, the dynamic of movement is not born from the multiplication of anatomical details, it is organized from full, closed volumes, linked with a rigorous economy of means.

The head, slightly turned, barely breaks the axis of the body; the legs, thick, almost geometric, extend a line of force that runs through the entire sculpture. The back, long and rigid, forms a continuous arch, stretching from one end of the skeleton to the other.

The coat is not indicated, the eyes barely hollowed out: all that matters is the animal's internal architecture, its weight in space. The bronze, with its deep brown patina, absorbs light more than it reflects it, accentuating the density of the form, its isolation in the void.

The surface, barely animated by a few irregularities, offers no focal point for the eye: it closes the sculpture in on itself, making it opaque, concentrated.

The base plays no decorative role; it is cut to the size of the animal, with no overhang, as if it were an extension of its material. The whole does not describe a naturalistic moment, it fixes a tension.

The movement is contained, almost thwarted, and it is this restraint that gives the sculpture its strength. No effects, no spectacular gestures, but a presence, compact, silent, self-sufficient, suspended between mass and movement.

Then, detached from any desire for illustration, the panther becomes pure form, organization of planes, geometric balance, closed density. Nothing weighs, but everything is heavy. Nothing soars, but everything is in tension.

Jean Joachim's imprint on his period

In Jean Joachim's work, the tradition of animal sculpture retains this ability to embody presence, to inscribe the living in the permanence of form.

But this loyalty to an established genre is not accompanied by any complacency: the animal is neither idealized nor naturalized, reduced to its lines of force, its silent weight in space.

This approach, at odds with the spectacular or narrative effects then in vogue, imposes another temporality: one of restraint, compact density, immobility in tension.

In a period marked by formal research into abstraction or experimentation with materials, Jean Joachim maintains a direct relationship with figuration, but without anecdote, without decoration. His sculptures don't describe a world, they extract it.

This refusal of illustration, this rigor of construction, give his work an autonomy that sculptors of his generation recognize.

Thus, detached from prevailing trends but faithful to a formal requirement, his sculpture leaves a discreet but tenacious imprint: that of a form that seeks not to seduce, but to endure.

Today, Jean Joachim's works are still rather discreet, but remain appreciated in the auction market.

More accessible than artists such as Petersen or Pompon, he remains a sought-after artist, particularly as his quotation doesn't fluctuate much, especially on the downside. Jean Joachim's sculptures therefore prove to be a profitable investment.

Animal sculpture in the 20th century

In animal sculpture of the XXᵉ century, figuration retains this function of capturing movement, restoring mass, inscribing the living in duration.

But this fidelity to the animal no longer involves meticulous description: it refocuses on the essential, on a synthetic, pared-down form, often stripped of all superfluous detail. Naturalism, without disappearing altogether, gives way to a search for structure, balance, contained tension.

At Pompon, the smooth surface erases the muscle; at Bugatti, the line fuses, carries away the material in a nervous rush; in Sandoz, stylization sometimes borders on abstraction. The subject remains, but slides towards a refined, concentrated image, detached from all decor.

Animal sculpture, without denying its foundations, is tightening up: it ceases to tell, it builds. Then, freed from its illustrative function, it retreats to form, material, the exact weighing of the body in space.

It is in this tension - between observation of reality and plastic elaboration - that its discreet but decisive evolution plays out throughout the century.

His signature

Jean Joachim signs his works most of the time. However, it's best to have them appraised if you think you might own some. Here's an example of his signature :

Knowing the value of a work

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