It immediately established Carpeaux as the heir of the Romantic sculptors of the 1830s. This work caused a sensation in Rome, and the boldness and vigor of Carpeaux’s dramatic rendition contrasted sharply with the prevailing Neoclassical formulae of the French Academy. The resulting multifigural plaster group, Ugolino and His Sons, renders a scene from Dante’s Divine Comedy (Canto 33) in which the Pisan Count Ugolino della Gherardesca and his sons are punished by starvation. He was especially receptive to the works of Michelangelo, whose gestural poses he observed carefully and incorporated into his own design for a fifth-year assignment ( 2001.199 1975.98.1). Many drawings from his study in Rome show that Carpeaux sketched his surroundings constantly ( 2000.105). Carpeaux created his first masterpiece, Fisherboy with a Shell (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes), which he subsequently exhibited at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1858. In the first year, each sculpture student produced a marble copy of an ancient statue with the help of a practitioner. Sequestered away from the distractions of the commercial art world, the pensioners at the Villa Medici were able to refine their skills and their taste for ancient and modern art. At the Villa Medici in January 1856, he began a five-year curriculum in which the completion of various assignments of increasingly complex sculptures and bas-reliefs was required. In 1854, he won the Grand Prix de Rome for his group Hector and His Son Astyanax (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes).Ī resolve to complete and receive payment for his bas-relief The Emperor Napoleon III Receiving Abd el-Kader at the Palace of Saint Cloud (as well as an eye injury and illness) delayed Carpeaux’s arrival at the French Academy in Rome by one year. This was followed by a second place for his figure Philoctetes on Lemnos. In 1850, he abandoned Rude’s studio for that of Francisque Duret, a teacher at the school under whose tutelage Carpeaux achieved an honorable mention for his Achilles Wounded in the Heel (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes) in the Prix de Rome competition the same year. Too talented to remain a tradesman or practitioner (an assistant who carved the marble according to the sculptor’s original concept), Carpeaux’s destiny was to become an artist.ĭuring training at the École des Beaux-Arts, Carpeaux additionally studied with Romantic sculptor François Rude. The Petit École took pride in its students and their achievements, especially those like Carpeaux, who was accepted for study at the renowned École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1844. A shift in the school’s curriculum under the leadership of Jean Hilaire Belloc in 1831 brought fresh sculpture courses, which perhaps influenced Carpeaux’s interest in the profession. There Carpeaux was trained both by the controversial modèle estampe method of copying prints after master drawings and by copying eighteenth-century sculpture. The École Gratuite de Dessin was founded in 1766 as a school for industrial workers and emphasized the economic utility of drawing for practitioners of many skilled métiers, including engraving, enameling, horology, masonry, and various sorts of woodwork. That these two schools were open to instruct youths like Carpeaux in drawing was part of a government policy to encourage the application of the fine arts to industry. Since drawing was a necessary tool of his trade, Carpeaux was enrolled in the Académie de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture in Valenciennes, and, after his family’s relocation to Paris in 1838, at the École Gratuite de Dessin (or Petite École) until 1843. Son and grandson of stonemasons in Valenciennes, he was apprenticed as a boy to Debaisieux, a plasterer. Like many nineteenth-century French sculptors, Carpeaux was from the working class. Breaking with traditional approaches to historical subjects and portraiture, Carpeaux infused his sculpture with a previously unseen freedom and immediacy. A later shift in taste toward a freer and more naturalistic style is exemplified by the work of Second Empire sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. Charles Baudelaire attacked on a more fundamental level in his 1846 essay, “Why Sculpture Is Boring,” which decried the limitations of three-dimensional sculptural representation in comparison to painting, arguably a more versatile and evocative medium. Critics of mid-nineteenth-century sculpture in France called attention to its often slavish mimicry of ancient works and to the pomposity of public monuments.
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