Edmé Bouchardon
Edmé Bouchardon | |
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File:Edme bouchardon sculpteur.jpg
Portrait of Bouchardon by François-Hubert Drouais in 1758.
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Born | Edmé Bouchardon 29 May 1698 Chaumont-en-Bassigny, France |
Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. Paris, France |
Nationality | French |
Known for | Sculpture |
Notable work | Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons |
Edmé Bouchardon (29 May 1698 – 27 July 1762) was a French sculptor who was esteemed as the greatest sculptor of his time[citation needed] and valued as a painter and draughtsman as well.[1]
Biography
A native of Chaumont-en-Bassigny, Bouchardon was the son of sculptor and architect, Jean-Baptiste Bouchardon. He became the pupil of sculptor Guillaume Coustou and was awareded the Prix de Rome in 1722. Resisting the rococo tendencies of his contemporaries, he was classical in style. The noted antiquarian Comte de Caylus said of Bouchardon that he had begun "to appropriate for himself the talent of the Ancients and find it again in Nature." During the ten years he remained in Rome, Bouchardon was given the task of creating the bust of Pope Benedict XIII.
In 1746, Bouchardon produced his first acclaimed masterpiece, "Cupid Fashioning a Bow out of the Club of Hercules," now in the Louvre Museum,[2] which struck early viewers as shockingly crude in its unideal naturalism. His other masterpiece is the Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons in Paris, commissioned in 1739, and completed six years later in 1745. Bouchardon was commissioned to design an equestrian statue of Louis XV, to commemorate France's victory in the War of Austrian Succession. Unfortunately, he did not live to finish this work and its completion was left his contemporary Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. Ultimately, the statue was destroyed during the French Revolution.
Bouchardon was a well-known designer of jetons or tokens/medals, which were distributed by the King. The subjects and themes were chosen by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and passed through an elaborate process of critiques before approval, which involved the King himself. Drawings and counterproofs for these jetons are now held at various museums and collections around the world including the Institut de France, the Musée de la Monnaie, and the Bibliothèque National.
Personal life
Bouchardon's brother, Jacques-Philippe Bouchardon, was also a sculptor, who became first sculptor to the king of Sweden.
Gallery
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Amor Bouchardon Louvre MR 1761.jpg
Amor Fashioning a Bow after the Club of Hercules, 1750, Louvre Museum
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Bouchardon Genius des Überflusses.jpg
Genius of Abundance, 1731; Bode Museum
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Study for the Equestrian Statue of Louis XV, c. 1750; Louvre Museum
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Edmé Bouchardon - Design for Fountain in Niche - Google Art Project.jpg
Design for Fountain in Niche, c. 1735; Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum
References
- ↑ The noted antiquarian Comte de Caylus had followed Bouchardon's career closely since 1733 and hailed him as a modern Phidias, which he wrote in Vie d'Edmé Bouchardon, Paris, 1763 that was reprinted in Geneva in 1973.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
External link
Media related to Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. at Wikimedia Commons
- Edmé Bouchardon in American public collections on the French Sculpture Census website
- Pages with broken file links
- Articles with hCards
- Articles with unsourced statements from July 2015
- Wikipedia articles incorporating a citation from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica with Wikisource reference
- 1698 births
- 1762 deaths
- People from Chaumont, Haute-Marne
- 18th-century French sculptors
- 18th-century French painters
- Prix de Rome for sculpture