Edmé Bouchardon

Edmé Bouchardon
Portrait of Bouchardon by François-Hubert Drouais in 1758.
Born	Edmé Bouchardon 29 May 1698 Chaumont-en-Bassigny, France
Died	27 July 1762(1762-07-27) (aged 64) Paris, France
Nationality	French
Known for	Sculpture
Notable work	Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons

Edmé Bouchardon (French:

On his return to France, he was employed in the royal art workshops at the Palace of Versailles, Working alongside his two brothers, he made statues for the Gardens of Versailles, including the statue of Proteus in the Basin of Neptune. In his style, he resisted the flamboyant Rocaille style of his contemporaries, and tended toward more classical models. Bouchardon sculpted "Cupid Fashioning a Bow out of the Club of Hercules", now in the Louvre, for the Gardens of Versailles. It depicted a realistic, unidealized adolescent Cupid in a natural posture, which was completely in contrast with the classical ideals. He first presented the model in terra cotta at the 1739 Salon, then a full-scale model in 1746. He was commissioned to make a marble version, which he created between 1747 and 1750. The work established his reputation, and also his fortune; he was paid a remarkable 21,000 livres.^[3]

His last completed major sculptural work was the

I have no doubt that Bouchardon will make of this fountain a fine piece of architecture; but what kind of fountain has only two faucets where the water porters will come to fill their buckets? This isn't the way fountains are built in Rome to beautify the city. We need to lift ourselves out of taste that is gross and shabby. Fountains should be built in public places, and viewed from all the gates. There isn't a single public place in the vast faubourg Saint-Germain; that makes my blood boil. Paris is like the statue of Nabuchodonosor, partly made of gold and partly made of muck.^[6]

Bouchardon was commissioned to make one last major work, an equestrian statue of

• 
  Bust of Pope Clement XII, plaster and terra-cotta (after 1730) California Palace of the Legion of Honor
• 
  Copy of the Barberini Faun in Rome made by Bouchardon (the Louvre) (1732)
• 
  Edme Bouchardon, Cupid, 1744, National Gallery of Art
• 
  Amor Fashioning a Bow after the Club of Hercules, 1750,

  Louvre Museum
• 
  Genius of Abundance, 1731; Bode Museum
• 
  Armand Gaston Maximilien de Rohan, bust in the library of Palais Rohan, Strasbourg (after 1730)
• 
  Porcelain figure of a street vendor (1750–60)
• 
  Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons, Paris (completed 1745)
• 
  Central portion of the Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons (1745)
• 
  Detail of the Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons, Paris (completed 1745) (Spring)
• 
  The finished equestrian statue of Louis XV for Place de la Concorde, completed by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1762)

Jetons

Bouchardon also designed jetons or metal tokens, 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.

Family

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

Drawings and etchings

Bouchardon was particularly skilled at drawing, and produced two series of drawings of working people in the streets of Paris. His drawings, made with sanguine or reddish chalk, were originally used to make a series of smaller ceramic sculptures of Parisian characters, such as street vendors (see gallery). Later they were made into a series of etchings by the historian and engraver Anne Claude de Caylus, under the title Studies made of the Lower Class or the Cries of Paris. These became a very valuable source of information for later social historians.^[7]

• 
  Study for the Equestrian Statue of Louis XV, c. 1750;

  Louvre Museum
• 
  Drawing of the continent America for a sculptural design (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
• 
  Design for Fountain in Niche, c. 1735;

  Cooper–Hewitt, National Design Museum
• 
  Design for a royal jeton, or commemorative token (1748)
• 
  Diana at the Bath after Returning from the Hunt (1730–60) (Metropolitan Museum)
• 
  A water carrier (1742) (Metropolitan Museum)
• 
  A firewood seller in Paris (1748) (Metropolitan Museum)
• 
  Oyster seller in Paris (1738) (Metropolitan Museum)

References

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Bibliography

• Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon
  (Artists of the World), Vol. 13, Saur, Munich 1996, from p. 425 (in German).
• Duby, Georges and Daval, Jean-Luc, La Sculpture de l'Antiquité au XXe Siècle, (French translation from German), Taschen, (2013), (
  ISBN 978-3-8365-4483-2
  )
• Geese, Uwe, Section on Baroque sculpture in L'Art Baroque – Architecture – Sculpture – Peinture (French translation from German), H.F. Ulmann, Cologne, 2015. (
  ISBN 978-3-8480-0856-8
  )

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Edmé Bouchardon.

• Edmé Bouchardon in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website