Claude André Deseine

Claude-André Deseine (12 April 1740 – 30 December 1823) was a French sculptor and the elder brother of Louis-Pierre Deseine.

Life

Deseine was the son of an artisan and his wife, and was one of many (perhaps more than fifteen) children.^[1] His father died in 1777 and a court ruled that Deseine, "being deaf and dumb from birth", could control his own income but had to have his possessions managed by guardians.^[1]

In 1778, he was a student at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris. Soon after, he started working professionally: in 1783 he sold busts of Madame Saint-Huberty, Voltaire and Rousseau, from his house in Paris.^[2] Deseine had been a former pupil of l'Abbe de l'Eppe, a priest who had opened the world's first free school for the deaf, and developed a form of sign language.^[2] In 1786 he presented the National Assembly with a bust of his former teacher.^[3]

Deseine's work gained prominence during the

After the fall of Robespierre in 1794 many Jacobins, including Deseine, went underground. Little is known of his later years.

Partial List of Works

• Portrait bust of Madame Saint-Huberty (1783)
• Portrait bust of Voltaire (1783)
• Portrait bust of Rousseau (1783)
• Portrait bust of a young girl with wreath of flowers (1784)
• Portrait bust of l’Abbé de l’Épée (1786)
• Portrait bust of Muhammad Osman Khan (1788)
• Allegory of Liberty, with M. d'Orléans (1791)
• Portrait bust of Mirabeau (1791)
• Portrait bust of Robespierre (1792)
• Portrait bust of
  Antoinette Gabrielle Danton
  (1793)
• Portrait bust of Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau (1793)
• Portrait bust of Jean-Paul Marat (1793)
• Portrait bust of Mucius Scaevola (1793)

• 
  Bust of

  Antoinette Gabrielle Danton
• 
  Bust of

  Robespierre (Musée de la Révolution française

  )

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Claude-André Deseine.

References