Joseph ERHARDY was born in Welch, West Virginia (USA) in 1928. In 1949, in full vogue of the American abstract movement, he left his native country and went to Florence (Italy) to study classical sculpture. In January 1952, he came to Paris, where he has been living ever since. After an abstract period, he returned to the figure at the end of the sixties. "I imagine that in three or four hundred years' time and perhaps in some remote place, such as the Mahdian bronzes extracted from the sea so far away from the workshops that had created them, a bronze by Erhardy will be accidentally unearthed. Those that discover it will wonder at its solid forms, at the perfect fullness of its volume, at the modeling akin to an egg's which is found only in high periods of statuary. The girl perched on a strange contraption will be seen as the officiant of an outlandish cult. She will be compared with all those figures that, from the Scythian solar hearses to Giocometti's "Woman on a Chariot" have solemnized the wheel. And even if an historian of techniques is there to remind that the contraption in question was called a bicycle, invented at the close of the 19th century and which, near the close of the following century, once again enjoyed widespread popularity, these data will interest less than the form used by the sculptor, contrived or rather rediscovered, thus testifying to the perfect unity of an art which, for millennia, will have scarcely varied its canons or even its themes". Jean Clair (Author - Director of the National Picasso Museum, Paris - General Director of the National Trust) n.b. The author is referring to an over-life sized sculpture in bronze of a girl on a bicycle with a basket of vegetables perched over the front wheel, entitled "Coming Home From Market", purchased by the city of Cergy-Pontoise (pop. 150,000), 19 miles north-west of Paris (France), and set up in the large prefectorial square.