Louis-Simon Boizot
Encyclopedia
Biography
Boizot was the son of Antoine Boizot, a designer at the Gobelins manufacture of tapestry. At sixteen, he became a student at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and worked in the atelier of the sculptor René-Michel SlodtzRené-Michel Slodtz
René-Michel Slodtz or Michelangelo and in France, Michel-Ange Slodtz was a French sculptor working in a Rococo style, and active mainly in Rome and Paris, and for the Menus-Plaisirs du Roi....
(1705-1764), with whom Houdon
Jean-Antoine Houdon
Jean-Antoine Houdon was a French neoclassical sculptor. Houdon is famous for his portrait busts and statues of philosophers, inventors and political figures of the Enlightenment...
also trained. Boizot took the Prix de Rome
Prix de Rome
The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...
for sculpture in 1762, for a sojourn at the French Academy in Rome (1765-70).
On his return to Paris he married Marguerite Virginie Guibert, daughter of the sculptor Honoré Guibert. He was admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1778 and exhibited at the annual salons
Paris Salon
The Salon , or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world...
until 1800. His portrait busts of Louis XVI
Louis XVI of France
Louis XVI was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre until 1791, and then as King of the French from 1791 to 1792, before being executed in 1793....
and Joseph II
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor
Joseph II was Holy Roman Emperor from 1765 to 1790 and ruler of the Habsburg lands from 1780 to 1790. He was the eldest son of Empress Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis I...
, executed during the Emperor's visit to his sister Marie Antoinette, were executed in 1777 and reproduced in biscuit porcelain at Sèvres. A subtly nuanced decorative panel in very low relief, an allegory of Les Eléments, ca. 1783 is at the Getty Museum.
In 1787, a royal commission from the comte d’Angiviller director of the Bâtiments du Roi
Bâtiments du Roi
The Bâtiments du Roi was a division of Department of the household of the Kings of France in France under the Ancien Régime. It was responsible for building works at the King's residences in and around Paris.-History:...
, for a series of heroic statues of illustrious French men for Versailles, resulted in Boizot's bust of Racine
Jean Racine
Jean Racine , baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine , was a French dramatist, one of the "Big Three" of 17th-century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition...
.
Manufacture nationale de Sèvres
The manufacture nationale de Sèvres is a Frit porcelain porcelain tendre factory at Sèvres, France. Formerly a royal, then an imperial factory, the facility is now run by the Ministry of Culture.-Brief history:...
, producing the series of white unglazed biscuit figures with a matte finish imitating marble, in which Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...
was softened by a Rococo
Rococo
Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...
sweetness, or by a sentimental moralizing, such as in his hard-paste Sèvres porcelain group of a woman giving aid to a crouching woman with two children, allegorical of Charity
Charity (virtue)
In Christian theology charity, or love , means an unlimited loving-kindness toward all others.The term should not be confused with the more restricted modern use of the word charity to mean benevolent giving.- Caritas: altruistic love :...
, ca 1785, now at the Getty Museum. Such figures were designed for chimneypieces or could be combined in a surtout de table. A vase produced at Sèvres, c 1787, in a classic amphora
Amphora
An amphora is a type of vase-shaped, usually ceramic container with two handles and a long neck narrower than the body...
shape was known as a Vase Boizot Boizot's connection with the piece is unclear: perhaps he provided the models for the gilt-bronze snakes that form handles.
Boizot also produced terracotta models for gilt-bronze clock cases, such as the allegorical figures of the "Avignon" clock in the Wallace Collection
Wallace Collection
The Wallace Collection is a museum in London, with a world-famous range of fine and decorative arts from the 15th to the 19th centuries with large holdings of French 18th-century paintings, furniture, arms & armour, porcelain and Old Master paintings arranged into 25 galleries.It was established in...
, London, cast and chased by Pierre Gouthière
Pierre Gouthière
Pierre Gouthière , French metal worker, was born at Bar-sur-Aube and went to Paris at an early age as the pupil of Martin Cour....
, 1777, and, exceptionally, for gilt-bronze furniture mounts on French royal furniture, where the meticulously kept accounts of the Garde-Meuble permit his role as modeller to be identified. Such a case is provided by the pair of draped female caryatid
Caryatid
A caryatid is a sculpted female figure serving as an architectural support taking the place of a column or a pillar supporting an entablature on her head. The Greek term karyatides literally means "maidens of Karyai", an ancient town of Peloponnese...
figures, balancing baskets on their heads and holding flowers and grapes in their laps applied to the corners of a drop-front secretary (secrétaire à abattant) that was produced under the direction of the sculptor and entrepreneur Jean Hauré for Louis XVI's Cabinet-Intérieur at Compiègne
Compiègne
Compiègne is a city in northern France. It is designated municipally as a commune within the département of Oise.The city is located along the Oise River...
, 1786-87. Among a host of craftsmen (Guillaume Beneman
Guillaume Beneman
Guillaume Beneman or Benneman was a prominent Parisian ébéniste, one of several of German extraction, working in the early neoclassical Louis XVI style, which was already fully developed when he arrived in Paris...
stamped the carcase) Boizot received 144 livres for his terracotta model, "de stil antique". (Watson 1966, I, no. 107).
Boizot's models for seated reading and writing female figures, conventionally called L'Étude and La Philosphie (1780), originally destined to be executed in Sèvres biscuit porcelain, were also copied in gilt-bronze by the ciseleur-doreur François Remondand assembled as mantel clocks retailed by the marchand-mercier
Marchand-mercier
A marchand-mercier is a French term for a type of entrepreneur working outside the guild system of craftsmen but carefully constrained by the regulations of a corporation under rules codified in 1613.. The reduplicative term literally means a merchant of merchandise, but in the 18th century took...
Dominique Daguerre
Dominique Daguerre
Dominique Daguerre was a Parisian marchand-mercier who was in partnership from 1772 with Simon-Philippe Poirier, an arbiter of taste and the inventor of furniture mounted with Sèvres porcelain plaques; Daguerre assumed Poirier's business at La Couronne d'Or in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré in 1777/78...
. Three were purchased for Louis XVI at Saint-Cloud
Saint-Cloud
Saint-Cloud is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the centre of Paris.Like other communes of the Hauts-de-Seine such as Marnes-la-Coquette, Neuilly-sur-Seine or Vaucresson, Saint-Cloud is one of the wealthiest cities in France, ranked 22nd out of the 36500 in...
; examples are in numerous public collections.
During the Revolution, he was a member of the Commission des Monuments in 1792. From 1805 he held a chair at the Academie des Beaux-Arts
Académie des beaux-arts
The Académie des Beaux-Arts is a French learned society. It is one of the five academies of the Institut de France.It was created in 1795 as the merger of the:* Académie de peinture et de sculpture...
. He executed the sculpture for the Fontaine du Palmier
Fontaine du Palmier
The Fontaine du Palmier is a monumental fountain located in the Place du Châtelet, between the Théâtre du Châtelet et the Théâtre de la Ville, in the First Arrondissement of Paris....
erected in 1808 in the Place du Châtelet
Place du Châtelet
The Place du Châtelet is a public square in Paris, on the right bank of the river Seine, on the borderline between the 1st and 4th arrondissements...
, Paris, in a more severe and bombastic Empire style. It celebrates Napoleon's return from Egypt. with a gilded Victory (finished in 1806) that surmounts a column with sphinx
Sphinx
A sphinx is a mythical creature with a lion's body and a human head or a cat head.The sphinx, in Greek tradition, has the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the face of a woman. She is mythicised as treacherous and merciless...
es spouting water at the base. The original of the Victory is in the gardens of the Musée Carnavalet.
-References
- L.S. Lami, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l'école française au dix-huitième siècle (Paris) 1910.
- Francis J.B. Watson, The Wrightsman Collection (Metropolitan Museum of Art), vol. I, no. 107 (the secrétaire à abattant), vol. II, p 563 (biography)
- (Getty Museum) Louis-Simon Boizot