CHAUDET, Antoine-Denis - b. 1763 Paris, d. 1810 Paris - WGA

CHAUDET, Antoine-Denis

(b. 1763 Paris, d. 1810 Paris)

Sculptor, painter, draughtsman and designer. He was a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Stouf and Etienne-Pierre-Adrien Gois. In 1784 he won the Prix de Rome with the bas-relief Joseph Sold into Slavery by his Brothers (Paris, Louvre), which is in a style very different from that of his mature statues and reliefs. He spent the next four years as a pupil at the Académie de France in Rome, where he was much influenced by the sculpture of antiquity and by the Neo-classical work of Antonio Canova. He was approved (agréé) as an associate of the Académie Royale in 1789, and though he never became a full member he exhibited regularly at the Salon throughout his career.

Like other sculptors of the period, Chaudet showed his concern for design by an interest in drawing; unlike most of them, he was also a painter, as was his wife Jeanne-Elisabeth Chaudet (née Gabiou, 1767-1832). He received important Imperial commissions, summed up by the statue of Napoleon for the top of the Place Vendome column.

Belisarius and his Guide

After Jean-Francois Marmontel’s 1767 novel, the theme of Belisarius was much in vogue from the 1770s. The story of Belisarius was that of a loyal and successful general in the service of the Byzantine emperor Justinian. He had won major victories against the Vandals, Goths and Bulgarians, but he then became implicated in political intrigues, was accused of treason and disgraced. He became an outcast and was even reduced to begging; one version of the story also said that his eyes were put out.

Chadet followed Jacques-Louis David’s painting of the subject which had won acclaim at the Salon of 1781. This painting shows the blind warrior seated beside his guide, who, hoping for alms, proffers a helmet to a soldier startled by the reduced condition of his former commander. In Chadet’s bronze, Belisarius gently supports the exhausted guide’s head on his lap. His blind-man’s staff is prominently held. Belisarius’s left arm is slung inside his robe which falls in front of the block on which he sits.

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Cupid Presenting a Rose to a Butterfly

Chaudet’s classicism is essentially decorative and delicate. It is no accident that the Cupid should be one of his best known sculptures, and its base is no less typical of his style, even if its execution is not entirely his, with its playful, graceful frieze showing on one side amoretti who have fired their arrows at a beehive and are alarmed at the result.

The sculpture was finished by Pierre Cartellier and presented at the Salon of 1817.

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