Bouchardon, Edme

Edmé Bouchardon ( fr. Edmé Bouchardon ; May 29, 1698 , Chaumont - July 27, 1762 , Paris ) - French sculptor who tried to instill in his contemporaries a taste for forms of ancient art; court sculptor of Louis XV , the forerunner of the aesthetics of classicism ; the son of the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Bouchardon and the elder brother of the sculptor Jacques-Philippe Bouchardon .

Edme Bushardon
Edmé bouchardon
Edme Bouchardon by Francois-Hubert Drouet (1758, Louvre
Date of Birth	May 29, 1698 ( 1698-05-29 )
Place of Birth	Chaumont , France
Date of death	July 27, 1762 ( 1762-07-27 ) (64 years old)
Place of death	Paris
A country
Awards	Roman Prize

Bouchardon was a pupil of Guillaume Cousteau ; in 1722 he received the Roman Prize and soon gained such fame that the Duke d'Anten called him from Rome to Paris , where he equipped him with a workshop in the Louvre . Already in his first works, Bushardon showed a desire to free himself from the Rococo mannerism and resurrect the eloquent laconicism of ancient art.

" Cupid making a bow for himself from the mace of Hercules " (1750).

Since 1737, Bouchardon exhibited his works in the “salon” of the Academy of Painting and attracted special attention with his busts, mythological groups and bas-reliefs, of which “St. Carl Borromeo , praying for the cessation of the infection in Milan ", as well as drawings, such as the" Festival of the Palais "," Lupercalia "," Harvesting grapes in the Athenian village ", etc., anacreontic content.

In 1740, Bouchardon exhibited a plaster model of the fountain for Grenelle Street , the performance of which, by order of the city of Paris, brought him great fame. The sophisticated Baroque sculpture caused a lot of envy and displeasure on the part of architects, without which Bushardon managed to do without construction, while representatives of the city, in gratitude, appointed him a lifelong pension of 1,500 livres .

In 1745, Bouchardon was admitted to the Academy of Painting for a marble statue depicting “Christ Carrying the Cross,” now in the Louvre Museum along with his most famous work, “Cupid Making a Bow from the Hercules Mace”. From his subsequent works, mention should be made of the mausoleum of Cardinal Fleury and the statues of Christ, the Virgin and the 8 apostles decorating the choirs of the church of Saint-Sulpice .

In moments of leisure, Bushardon, leaving aside strict antiquity, entertained himself with a depiction of real, contemporary life to him; his Études prises dans le Bas Peuple, ou les Cris de Paris, stored in the Louvre, is an extremely vivid image of a Parisian street in the 18th century.