OTTIN, Auguste

(b. 1811 Paris, d. 1890 Paris)

French academic sculptor, a pupil of David d’Angers.

Ottin was a friend of Théodore Chassériau, a pupil in the atélier of Ingres. In 1834 Ottin was responsible for the assembly of the vast ‘surtout de table’ of hunting vignettes, commissioned for the Tuileries by Louis-Philippe’s heir, Ferdinand-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, and entrusted to the supervision of Claude-Aimé Chenavard, who gave much of the sculptural work to Antoine-Louis Barye, the celebrated animal sculptor. In 1836 he shared with Jean-Marie Bonnassieux the Grand Prix de Rome for a sculpture of Socrates drinking the draft. One vestige of his Roman sojourn of 1836-40 is a View of Rome, 1837, in graphite and watercolour, at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Ottin’s portrait bust of the painter and Director of the Academy, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, executed shortly after his return to Paris in 1840, in plaster, tinted terracotta, is conserved by the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Ottin’s Laure de Noves (1850), Petrarch’s Laura, is one of a series of Queens of France and historical ladies that had been commissioned for the Jardin du Luxembourg under Louis-Philippe.

About the same time he was commissioned to provide the sculptural elements for a room in an old palazzo in Florence, via de’ Renai, that was designed as an homage to the social utopian Charles Fourier by an admirer of his philosophy, François Sabatier, who had recently wed the palazzo’s owner, the Austrian singer, Carolina Ungher.

During the Second Empire, he executed a full-length official sculpture of Napoleon III, which is still at Compiègne. In 1866 he was commissioned to provide a sculptural centrepiece for the Fontaine Médicis in the Jardin du Luxembourg: Polyphemus Surprising Acis and Galatea, his best-known work.

In the new Square Emile-Chautemps at Le Sentier, Paris IIIème, among the sculptural figures enhancing two oval pools under the general artistic direction of Gabriel Davioud, Ottin was entrusted with seated bronze figures of Mercury and Music. In the extensive sculptural programme of the Palais Garnier for the Opéra, Ottin was entrusted with La Musique and La Danse seated figures leaning on a central medallion in the arched pediment on the west-facing façade. He also provided standing females representing northern French cities for the less-demanding programme of the Gare du Nord. Among similar commissions is his statue of Euthymenes for the Bourse, Marseille.

Campaspe

The statue on the north fa�ade of the Cour Carr�e in the Louvre represent Campaspe taking off her clothes in front of Apelles by order of Alexander.

Apelles, the celebrated painter of ancient Greece, was court painter to Alexander the Great. The elder Pliny (Nat. Hist. 35:36) tells how Apelles was engaged by the emperor to paint his favourite concubine, the beautiful Campaspe, and how while doing so he fell in love with her. Alexander, as a mark of his appreciation of the painter’s work, made him a present of her.

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Modern Wrestling: The Hip Throw

In France the Neoclassicism had the appearance of the official style under the Second Empire. However, Neoclassicism seemed ill-adapted to the modern world. One of the first questions raised was that of the nude. Few sculptors, in fact, were able, like Auguste Ottin, to find a subject to justify it in the contemporary world. The idea for his Modern Wrestling: The Hip Throw came from two famous wrestlers who staged bouts in Paris in 1859, the “hip throw” being one of the best-known throws in hand-to-hand combat. However, the obvious conclusion is that this is simply a modern version of the famous antique statue in Florence known as the Athletes.

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Polyphemus Surprising Acis and Galatea

The picture shows the Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.

In 1866 Ottin was commissioned to provide a sculptural centrepiece for the Fontaine M�dicis in the Jardin du Luxembourg, one of the few survivals of Salomon de Brosse’s gardens for Marie de Medici. The result was his best-known work, Polyphemus Surprising Acis and Galatea, where the bronze giant crouches above the rocky grotto in which Galatea lies in the arms of Acis, who leans on his elbow in the manner of a river god — which he is just about to become. His Pan and Diana in marble accompany the group.

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