DUBOIS, Paul

(b. 1829 Nogent-sur-Seine, d. 1905 Paris)

French sculptor and painter. He studied law and art. After his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts he went to Rome and in 1860 he first contributed busts to the Salon in Paris. For his first exhibited statues, The Infant St John the Baptist and Narcissus at the Bath (1863), he was awarded a medal of the second class. His statue of the Infant St John was bought by the Musée de Luxembourg. A Florentine Singer of the Fifteenth Century (depicted in doublet and hose playing a lute), for a time one of the most reproduced statuettes in Europe, was shown in 1865. The Virgin and Child was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in France in 1867. The Birth of Eve was produced in 1873, and was followed by striking busts of Jean-Jacques Henner, Dr Parrot, Paul Baudry, Louis Pasteur, Charles Gounod and Léon Bonnat, remarkable alike for life, vivacity, likeness, refinement and subtle handling.

As a painter he restricted himself mainly to portraiture. My Children (1876) being probably his most noteworthy achievement.

In 1873 he became the keeper of the Musée de Luxembourg. He succeeded Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume as director of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878, and Jean-Joseph Perraud as member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He was elected as an honorary foreign academician of the Royal Academy of London in 1895.

He is best known for the tomb of General Lamoriciere in Nantes Cathedral and the statue of Joan of Arc in Rheims.

Florentine Singer

The Florentine Singer (which the artist’s notebooks allow us to relate to figures by Benozzo Gozzoli, Pinturicchio, and Lorenzo da Viterbo) earned Dubois the ‘m�daille d’honneur’ at the 1865 Salon. Highly representative, both in terms of its refined and pleasing appearance and in terms of the culture to which it refers, of a whole school of Second Empire sculpture, this was undoubtedly also one of the best-known works of the period.

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Narcissus

This is a copy of the marble original (1863-66) in the Cour Carr� of the Louvre, Paris.

In the middle years of the nineteenth century, scholars at the Acad�mie de France had rather forgotten about the road to Tuscany. They resumed the habit of going there to work after Paul Dubois, who spent from 1859 to 1863 in Italy at his own expense had made it fashionable once more. Visitors to the 1863 Salon were surprised to discover the plaster version of Narcissus, in which they did not see the usual Neoclassical models but were confronted with a study from life, closely observed without seeking to be realist. Critics could not praise the work too highly. Some particularly liked the way in which, though drawing his inspiration from the Florentine statuary of the Quattrocento, the artist had primarily looked for beauty. The reception accorded to the work by public and critics was confirmed by an official commission to carve Narcissus in marble for the Louvre’s Cour Carr�e and subsequently to produce a replica, also in marble for the Mus�e du Luxembourg.

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