Antoine Coysevox

Charles Antoine Coysevox ( or ; 29 September 164010 October 1720) was a French sculptor in the Baroque and Louis XIV style, best known for his sculpture decorating the gardens and Palace of Versailles and his portrait busts.

Biography Coysevox was born 29 September 1640 in Lyon. He was the son of a sculptor, from a family which had emigrated from Franche-Comté, a Spanish possession at the time. He made his first work of sculpture of the Madonna when he was only seventeen.

Coysevox came to Paris in 1657 and joined the workshop of the sculptor Louis Lerambert. He trained himself further by making copies in marble of Roman sculptures, including a Venus de Medici and the Castor and Pollux. In 1666, he married Marguerite Quillerier, Lerambert's niece, who died a year after the marriage. In 1679, he married Claude Bourdict. He became part of the extraordinary team of sculptors, painters, and decorators, under the control of Le Brun, who between 1677 and 1685 produced the decoration of the Palace and Gardens of Versailles. Later, between 1701 and 1709, when Louis XIV built a new Château de Marly, where he could escape from the crowds and ceremony at Versailles, with Coysevox providing several works for that site.

Coysevox rose steadily in the artistic hierarchy. He became a professor at the Royal Academy in 1678, and then its director in 1702, with an annual pension of four thousand livres. In this position, he guided the training of a generation of French sculptors, including his nephews Nicolas Coustou (1659–1733) and Guillaume Coustou (1677–1746), who became important figures in French sculpture of the early 18th century.

Coysevox died in Paris on 10 October 1720.

For the façade of the dome of the royal chapel of Les Invalides, he sculpted a bust of Charlemagne, a pendant to the statue of Louis XI by another royal sculptor, Nicolas Coustou. On the upper level of the same chapel, he made a group of statues illustrating The Cardinal Virtues.

Portrait busts Coysevox sculpted portrait busts of many of the celebrated men and women of his age. The faces of his busts were considered remarkably accurate; he did not flatter his subjects, but by the poses, detail and precision of the costumes he gave them a particular dignity. His subjects included Louis XIV and Louis XV, at Versailles; Jean-Baptiste Colbert (the kneeling figure of his tomb at Saint-Eustache); Cardinal Mazarin, (in the church of the Collège des Quatre-Nations); Louis, Grand Condé (in the Louvre); Maria Theresa of Spain; Turenne; Vauban; the Cardinal de Bouillon; and Melchior de Polignac; the duc de Chaulnes (National Gallery of Art, Washington); François Fénelon; Jean Racine; André Le Nôtre (church of St-Roch); Jacques Benigne Bossuet (in the Louvre); the comte d'Harcourt; Cardinal Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg; and Charles Le Brun (in the Louvre).