Edme Bouchardon

Edmé Bouchardon (; 29 May 169827 July 1762) was a French sculptor best known for his neoclassical statues in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, his medals, his equestrian statue of Louis XV for the Place de la Concorde (destroyed during the French Revolution); and for the Fountain of Four Seasons in Paris. He was also a draftsman and painter, and made celebrated series of engravings of working-class Parisians.

Biography Bouchardon was born in Chaumont-en-Bassigny, the son of a sculptor and architect, Jean-Baptiste Bouchardon. He learned sculpture first in the studio of his father, and then with Guillaume Coustou. He won the Prix de Rome of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1722, and as a consequence lived and worked in Rome from 1722 to 1732. He resisted the more ornate tendencies of the Rocaille style, and moved toward neoclassicism. While in Rome, he specialized in busts of distinguished patrons, including Pope Benedict XIII. In 1726 he also began a copy of the Barberini Faun, a Classical Hellenic sculpture from the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. His copy arrived in France in 1732, and was greatly admired, and aided the transition of French sculpture toward neoclassicism.

His last completed major sculptural work was the Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons on the Rue de Grenelle in Paris, commissioned in 1739, and completed six years later in 1745. This work featured a classical colonnade, decorated with statuary. It was similar in its arrangement of statues made by Michelangelo in the Sagrestia Nuova in Florence. His sculpture was widely admired. It was featured, along with a fine engraving of the fountain, in the article on classical sculpture by Jacques-François Blondel in the French Encyclopédie of 1765. However, it also drew considerable criticism, the colossal sculptural work on a narrow street provided only a tiny trickle of water. The project was criticized by Voltaire in a letter to Anne Claude de Caylus in 1739, as the fountain was still under construction:

Bouchardon was commissioned to make one last major work, an equestrian statue of Louis XV for the Place Louis XV, to commemorate France's victory in the War of Austrian Succession. He died before the work was finished. It was completed by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, but was destroyed during the French Revolution.