DELAISTRE, François-Nicolas

French sculptor. He was a pupil of Félix Lecomte and of Louis-Claude Vassé. He won the Prix de Rome in 1772 and, after a year at the Ecole Royale des Elèves Protégés, completed his training at the Académie de France in Rome between 1773 and 1777. It was there that he probably first met the architect Pierre-Adrien Pâris, for whom he later worked and who owned several of his terracotta models (Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts). His best-known work, the group Cupid and Psyche, was originally executed in Rome (later marble version; Paris, Louvre); it is a graceful, rather precious treatment of a theme popular with Neo-classical sculptors, made for the collector Pierre-Marie Gaspard Grimod, Comte d’Orsay.