Achille Valois

Achille-Joseph-Étienne Valois (13 January 1785 — 17 December 1862) was a French designer and sculptor who studied for a time in the atelier of Jacques-Louis David and whose sculptural works may be seen in Paris.[1] He also studied with Antoine-Denis Chaudet.[2]

Achille Valois

Career

Among his early works is the Fontaine de Léda (1806–08) in Fontainebleau style re-sited in the Jardin du Luxembourg. At the restoration of the Bourbons he hastened to execute a bust of Louis XVIII.[3] In 1816 he sculpted a portrait of Madame Royale the duchesse d'Angoulême, eldest daughter of the late Louis XVI.[4] His bust of the sculptor Antoine-Denis Chaudet, with whom he had also studied, exhibited at the Salon of 1817, was bought in 1820 for the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers.[5] He contributed a marble bas-relief of children representing Medicine intended for a fountain in Place de la Bastille (1817)[6] colossal statues of Louis XVI for Montpellier[7] and the cast-iron Pêche des coquillages (1838–40) to the central Fontaines de la Concorde, designed by Jacques Ignace Hittorff for Place de la Concorde.

As a draughtsman, Valois produced a drawing of the triumphal arrival of celebrated works of art from the Vatican in Paris, 1798,[8] that was copied on a Sèvres porcelain "Etruscan" vase (Vase Étrusque à rouleaux) in 1813.[9]

Valois was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in 1825.[10]

Notes
  1. Émile Bellier de La Chavignerie (ed.), Dictionnaire général des artistes de l'école française, s.v. "Valois, Achille-Joseph-Étienne", includes a longer list of executed commissions.
  2. MacKay, James, The Dictionary of Sculptors in Bronze, Antique Collectors Club, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1977, p. 380
  3. A bronze cast dated 1814, was sold from the collection of Thierry de Maigret, 10 December 2003, lot 166 (ArtNet).
  4. Dictionnaire.
  5. Angers 1994, no.28, illustrated.
  6. Dictionnaire général .
  7. Models shown in the Salons of 1822 and 1827 (Dictionnaire).
  8. Martin Rosenberg, "Raphael's Transfiguration and Napoleon's Cultural Politics", Eighteenth-Century Studies 19.2 (Winter 1985-1986):180-205) p.193, illus. p. 194.
  9. The vase, conserved in the Musée National de Céramique, Sèvres, is illustrated in Lynn Springer Roberts, "The Londonderry Vase: A Royal Gift to Curry Favor", Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 15.1 (1989:68-81+88) p. 81 fig 14.
  10. Dictionnaire général .
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Achille Valois.
  • Achille Valois in American public collections, on the French Sculpture Census website
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