James Pradier

A Swiss-born French sculptor, James Pradier (1790–1852) – was best known for his neoclassical style work.

Pradier was born in Geneva, but left in 1807 to go and work with his brother Charles-Simon, an engraver, in Paris. He became successful studying under Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres in Paris and winning a ‘Prix de Rome’ that meant he could study in Rome, which he did between 1814 and 1818.

He became a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in 1827 and went on to become a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He moved in the artistic and literary elite of Paris and was friends with Romantic poets such as Alfred de Musset, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo and the young Gustave Flaubert.

Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Pradier oversaw the finishing of his sculptures himself. Working with mythological themes, their neoclassical cool surface finish was charged with an eroticism that sparked a certain amount of outrage. Pradier’s ’Satyr and Bacchante’ presented at the Salon of 1834, created a scandalous furore when some claimed they recognized the features of the Pradier and his mistress, Juliette Drouet. As a result the government of Louis-Philippe refused to buy it, but Count Anatole Demidoff purchased it and took it to his Florence palazzo. It has since been returned to the Louvre.

Despite his reputation, he did famous ‘monumental’ work in Paris, sculpting the figures of Fame in the Arc de Triomphe, decorative figures at La Madeleine and the twelve Victories surrounding Napoleon’s tomb in Les Invalides.

He died in 1852 and was buried in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, after which the city museum of Geneva bought up most of the contents of his studio.

In modern times Pradier has been largely forgotten, but some exhibitions in the 1980s in both Geneva and Paris have revived interest in his life and work.