Pierre Lepautre
French, 1660 - 1744
Sculptor, son of Jean Le Pautre (1622–76), a master mason and building contractor. In 1683 he won the Prix de Rome, and the following year he went to the Académie de France in Rome, where he was a talented and much praised student. Among his Roman works were two copies after the Antique executed for Louis XIV, the marble groups Faun with a Kid (1685–7; Paris, Louvre) and Meleager (1687–92; on loan to the Hôtel Matignon, Paris). He also executed two original works, the marble groups Paetus and Arria (1691–5; Paris, Louvre), from a model by Jean Théodon and started by him, and Aeneas Carrying his Father Anchises (1696–1718; Paris, Louvre), from a model by François Girardon. Both demonstrate his early mastery of complex Baroque compositional effects, and the popularity of the latter group is attested by numerous reductions in terracotta and bronze recorded in 18th- and 19th-century sales. He returned to Paris in 1701 and, although invited to become a member of the Académie Royale, preferred instead to join the Académie de St Luc, of which he eventually became a Recteur for life.
Le Pautre was mostly employed by the Bâtiments du Roi, providing statuary and decorative sculpture for the royal building projects of the early 18th century. He provided an over life-size plaster statue of St Marcelline (c. 1702; destr.) for the church of the Invalides, Paris, and a running statue of Atalanta (marble, 1703–4; Paris, Louvre), based on an antique original, which was the first of a series of four ‘runners’ completed by Nicolas Coustou and Guillaume Coustou (i) for the gardens at the Château de Marly, Yvelines. He played an important role in the decoration of the chapel of Versailles where, between 1705 and 1710, he executed a number of decorative reliefs for the interior (stone; in situ) and bronze putti with animated drapery for two subsidiary altars (in situ), as well as statues of St Ambrose and St Gregory (stone; in situ) for the balustrade of the roof. In 1710 he carved a marble statue of a nymph (untraced) for the well-known series of Companions of Diana intended for Marly, and in 1712–13 he contributed to the decoration (destr.) of the choir of Notre Dame, Paris. In the years following the death of Louis XIV in 1715, during which major commissions from the Bâtiments du Roi were relatively rare, he undertook work for private patrons and in particular for the churches and religious communities of Paris. About 1716 he executed the monument in the church of St Merry, Paris, to Jean Aubery, Marquis de Vastan (marble; destr.), which consisted of a putto unveiling an oval portrait medallion of the deceased. His most important surviving religious work is the elaborate carved wooden churchwardens’ pew at St Eustache, Paris. Executed c. 1720 to designs by Jean-Silvain Cartaud, it consists of a large portico supported by fluted Ionic columns on a semi-elliptical plan. The semi-elliptical pediment is surmounted by a cloud-borne statue of St Agnes Surrounded by Putti, and beneath it hangs a crucifix in an oval medallion supported by three angels. His last commission was a marble statue of Clytie (New York, priv. col., see Souchal, ii, p. 387), commissioned for Louis XV in 1730. In his maturity Le Pautre was one of the most consistent sculptors of the later part of the reign of Louis XIV and of the Régence period. His style, characterized by a balanced grace that did not exclude elegance or animation, drew on the lightly classicizing tendencies of the sculpture produced for Versailles at the end of the 17th century and on the decorative inventiveness of the emerging Rococo.
Elaine Evans Dee, et al. "Le Pautre." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T050476pg3 (accessed March 7, 2012).
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