Edmé Bouchardon

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 awarded 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, 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 nationale.

Personal life

Bouchardon's brother, Jacques-Philippe Bouchardon, was also a sculptor, who became first sculptor to the king of Sweden.