Charles Cordier was born in Cambrai in the autumn of 1827. In his youth, he served as an apprentice to a jeweler in his native town and it fostered his interest in plastic arts and fine art.

During his youth, he served as a jeweller’s apprentice in his hometown, an experience that shaped his interest in sculpture and the arts.

In 1846, Cordier entered the École Impériale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, joining the class of François Rude. In 1847, Charles Cordier worked with Saïd Abdallah of the Mayac, a formerly enslaved Black man who earned a living as a model. The Sudanese man's plaster bust, presented at the Paris Salon of 1848, became the budding sculptor's first major success. Today, this bust is part of the collection of The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, USA.

Following his success at the 1848 Salon, Cordier regularly participated in exhibitions of various levels. At the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, he presented several of his works, including The African Venus and the bust of Saïd Abdallah, which were acquired by Queen Victoria. At the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Cordier debuted his first polychrome works: Chinese Man and Chinese Woman. In July 1860, an ethnographic series of 12 sculptures, created after his journey to Algeria, was exhibited at the Palais de l'Industrie. The sculptor also participated in the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle and continued to regularly exhibit his works at the Salon. In 1873, Charles Cordier's works were shown in Vienna.

From 1851 to 1866, Charles Cordier held the position of sculptor at the Paris Museum of Natural History (Muséum national d'histoire naturelle). While serving in this position, he undertook a six-month expedition to Algeria in 1856, travelled to Greece in 1858, and spent time in Egypt from March to June 1866. During these journeys, he made sketches that later became the basis for his ethnographic sculptures. The method of Cordier, method, which synthesized the art of sculpture with the emerging science of anthropology, was revolutionary. Previously, the prevalent method for capturing and preserving unique features involved making life casts and masks from the faces of living individuals of various races, aiming to preserve and convey their unique features. The Chinese couple, whose portraits Cordier captured in the 1850s, had refused this procedure, finding it humiliating and inappropriate.

During his travel in Algeria, the artisan discovered rich deposits of onyx. The Sudan Negro (Le Nègre du Soudan) became the first work in which Cordie combined bronze and onyx, crafting the bust and turban from the mineral. This discovery contributed to the rising popularity of Algerian minerals, particularly marble.

The popularity of the Cordier's sculptures grew each year. This success was further fuelled by the rediscovery of polychromy in ancient sculpture – a style highly revered in the 19^th century – as well as the rapid development of photography. Charles Cordier entered into an agreement with Charles Marville, a prominent photographer of Second Empire Paris, to create an ethnographic album featuring photographs of his sculptural works. Thanks to the wide circulation of this album and the public's keen interest, Cordier not only secured his footing in Parisian artistic circles but also began receiving state commissions for both anthropological and art museums.

While his ethnographic works undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping our understanding of Charles Cordier creative legacy, he was also an outstanding portraitist of the Second Empire era. Out of the sculptor’s 612 known works, 102 are commissioned high-society portraits. Regrettably, it is not always possible today to reconstruct the biographies of the individuals immortalized in the works of Cordie; however, they were clearly prominent figures within aristocratic circles. For instance, the museum Collection Repository features a portrait of Princess Marie Radziwiłł (née Blanc), who was the daughter of the founders of the Société des Bains de Mer in Monaco.

Today, sculptures authored by Charles Cordier are presented in the world’s finest museum collections.