Edme Bouchardon

Edme Bouchardon is considered one of the greatest French sculptor and draftsman of the eighteenth century. Edme Bouchardon was the sone of the Burgundian sculptor and architect Jean-Baptiste Bouchardon. He entered Guillaume Coustou’s workshop in Paris in 1720. Bouchardon's training must have already been solidly acquired, however, as the following year he won the Prix de Rome. He settled in Rome in 1723 and stayed there for ten years. He complied with the traditional exercises of the boarders, drawing without respite after classical antiquities and the famous works of the Renaissance and the Baroque. Edme Bouchardon's talent was quickly recognized. Among the artist’s first commissions was the bust of Baron von Stosch. Returning to Paris in 1733, Bouchardon was immediately accepted into the Academy, and definitively admitted in 1744. He became a professor there two years later. His most famous sculptures are the Fontaine de Grenelle and the equestrian statue of Louis XV for the Place Royale. Edme Bouchardon’s works manifest both great naturalism and a pronounced taste for idealized classicism, making the artist a precursor of neoclassicism.