Background
James Pradier was born in Geneva, Switzerland on May 23, 1790. Pradier was the son of a Protestant family from Toulouse.
James Pradier was born in Geneva, Switzerland on May 23, 1790. Pradier was the son of a Protestant family from Toulouse.
Pradier attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts beginning in 1808. He studied in Rome from 1814 to 1818 at the Villa Medicts and under Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in Paris.
In 1827 he became a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Pradier oversaw the finish of his sculptures himself.
The cool neoclassical surface finish of his sculptures is charged with an eroticism that their mythological themes can barely disguise. At the Salon of 1834, Pradier's Satyr and Bacchante created a scandalous sensation. Some claimed to recognize the features of the sculptor and his mistress, Juliette Drouet. When the prudish government of Louis-Philippe refused to purchase it, Count Anatole Demidoff bought it and took it to his palazzo in Florence. (It has since come back to the Louvre).
His chief works are the Niobe group (1822), Ata-anta (1850), Psyche (1824), Sappho (1852) (all iu the Louvre), Prometheus (Tuileries Gardens), a bas-relief on the triumphal arch of the Carrousel, the figures of "Fame" on the Arc de l'Etoile, and a statue of J. J. Rousseau for Geneva. Besides these mention should be made of his "Three Graces"(1821).
He was a member of the French Academy.
He was a friend of the Romantic poets Alfred de Musset, Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and the young Gustave Flaubert, and his atelier was a center, presided over by his beautiful mistress.
Quotes from others about the person
"This is a great artist, a true Greek, the most antique of all the moderns; a man who is distracted by nothing, not by politics, nor socialism, and who, like a true workman, sleeves rolled up, is there to do his task morning til night with the will to do well and the love of his art". - Gustave Flaubert
James Pradier married Louis d'Arcot in 1833 but they would separate in 1845.