Martin Desjardins
Martin Desjardins, born Martin van den Bogaert (1637 – 2 May 1694) was a French sculptor and stuccoist of Dutch birth.
He was born at
Musée du Louvre
).
From this time he received royal commissions, at
monument to Louis XIV's victories on the Place des Victoires
in Paris included bronze representations of Four Captive Nations (1682–85), celebrating the early victories of the armies of Louis XIV over the alliances of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Brandenburg and the Dutch Republic. They ornamented the socle of Desjardins' standing sculpture of Louis XIV, which was melted down at the Revolution. Today the Captifs are conserved in the Louvre, their gilding weathered away. A marble workshop copy of the Louis XIV is to be seen in the Orangerie at Versailles.
Similarly his
Rhône and the Saône, which flow together at Lyon, were spared and are conserved in the Hôtel de Ville, Lyon. A commission for a third equestrian monument, for Aix-en-Provence, came to nothing; when the Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger visited Desjardins in 1687, the sculptor described to him the project he had had in mind, for the king on a rearing horse that would have been supported on its hind legs and tail.[3]
His portrait bust of Pierre Mignard, premier peintre du Roi was a gift to the painter's daughter in the year following Mignard's death (Louvre). Grand baroque marble bust of the marquis de Villacerf is also at the Louvre.
After his death, in Paris, his nephew Jacques Desjardins continued the atelier, providing the cultural agents of the Swedish crown with plaster models that were the basis in the 1740s, of an equestrian monument of
Karl XII of Sweden
(Patricia Wengraf, see link).
References, notes and sources
- References and notes
- ^ See Charles Le Brun’s drawing for Girardon’s monument to Louis XIV that was planned 1679-83 for the Louvre. (F. Souchal, Supplement, 1993, p. 105).
- ^ It had been completed well before that date: Roger Scabol was contracted in 1693 to make the moulds for casting it (Wengraf, see ref.) Engravings of it, and a bronze reductions by Nicolas Delacolonge, dated 1726, give a clear idea of its format.
- ^ Pietro Tacca had achieved such a balancing feat in an equestrian monument of Philip IV, sent to Madrid in 1640.
- Sources
- Souchal, François, 1977. French sculptors of the 17th and 18th centuries. The reign of Louis XIV. (Oxford).
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Martin Desjardins.
- Three sculptures by Martin Desjardins
- Patrician Wengraf, ""
- Martin Desjardins in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
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