Background
Born in Geneva, Pradier was the son of a Protestant family from Toulouse.
Born in Geneva, Pradier was the son of a Protestant family from Toulouse.
He left for Paris in 1807 to work with his elder brother, Charles-Simon Pradier, an engraver, and also attended the École des Beaux-Arts beginning in 1808. He studied under Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in Paris.
Pradier made his debut at the Salon in 1819 and quickly acquired a reputation as a competent artist. 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.
(lieutenant has since come back to the Louvre). Other famous sculptures by Pradier are the figures of Fame in the spandrels of the Arc de Triomphe, decorative figures at the Madeleine, and his twelve Victories inside the dome of the Invalides, all in Paris.
Foreign his native Geneva he completed the statue of the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau erected in 1838 on the tiny Île Rousseau, where Lac Léman empties to form the Rhône.
Aside from large-scale sculptures Pradier collaborated with François-Désiré Froment-Meurice, designing jewelry in a "Renaissance-Romantic" style. He is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. Much of the contents of his studio were bought up after his death by the city museum of Geneva.
Pradier"s importance as an artist in his day is demonstrated by the fact that his portrait is included in François Joseph Heim"s painting Charles X Distributing Prizes to Artists as the Salon of 1824, now in the Louvre Museum, Paris.
Pradier has been largely forgotten in modern times. In 1846 Gustave Flaubert said of him, however:
An exhibition, Statues de chair: sculptures de James Pradier (1790–1852) at Geneva"s Musée d"Art et d"Histoire (October 1985 – February 1986) and Paris, Musée du Luxembourg (February – May 1986), roused some interest in Pradier"s career and aesthetic.
Pradier"s students included:.
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
In 1827 he became a member of the Académie des beaux-arts and a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts.