PRÉAULT, Antoine-Augustin

During the reigns of Louis XVIII Louis Philippe, many commissions were given to various artists to execute statues of great men and women who played an important role in the history of France. These statues were placed in the Château de Versailles and in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.

Louis-Philippe commissioned a series of statues comparable to that of Versailles for the Luxembourg Gardens, in memory of Marie de M�dicis for whom the palace had been built. Most of them are the queens of France, executed with a moving concern for historical accuracy. There were, however, other famous women, including Joan of Arc by Rude and Cl�mence Isaure, the beautiful languid poetess, by Pr�ault.

In 1868 Pr�ault executed two plaster models, Jupiter and the Sphinx, and Venus and the Sphinx, which were accepted as the basis for stone statues to ornament the garden of an imperial residence at the Palais de Fontainebleau.

French Mannerist art may have guided Pr�ault’s approach, but a drawing he made earlier in Rome shows that it was Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the Sistine Ceiling that directly inspired the pose of Venus here. Jupiter’s features are borrowed from an ancient statue of Mausolus carved for that ruler’s tomb at Halicarnassus.

In placing the figures of deities on the backs of fabled creatures, Pr�ault was following antique and Renaissance precedents - like other late nineteenth-century artists - but his manner of doing so broke all rules. The figures’ poses are tense and awkward, and their musculature exaggerated.

The Franco-Prussian War intervened, and the stone versions were not carved and installed until 1872.

To differentiate themselves from Neoclassicism, Romantic artists sought new sources of inspiration in the literature and world of fantasy peculiar to each country. Following the painters, Romantic sculptors drew on such sources as Dante, Shakespeare, Tasso and Ariosto, as well as contemporary novelists.

Pr�ault’s Ophelia with the body in disarray, the moving tortured face, floating in water which cannot be distinguished from her hair and the robes enveloping her, follows a principle of equation which is already symbolist.

Although Romanticism made its appearance in painting from 1820 onwards, there was a gap of ten years before it was expressed in sculpture at the Salon of 1831 by Duseigneur’s Orlando Furioso, with its bulging muscles and twisted limbs, and the Tiger and Crocodile by Barye. These works were soon followed by Etex’s Cain, executed in Rome, as a bravado gesture because he did not win the Grand Prix, and by the creations of Pr�ault. Pride of place in the latter should be given to The Killing, an unrealistic juxtaposition of screaming masks with gaping mouths, streaming or bristling hair and clenched hands, all depicted with unrivalled violence. Conceived as an “episodical fragment,” it reminds us today of the technique of “assemblages.”

Pr�ault was the pupil of David d’Angers. A typically Romantic character, he mixed 19th-century social ideas with his art. In 1834 he manifested his talent with a relief fragment (cast in bronze in 1859) called The Killing, a striking representation of figures larger than life, tearing at each other. This daring and nightmarish vision, possibly inspired by a popular melodrama of the time, is the work most characteristic of Pr�ault’s extremism, of his passionate concern with movement, ugliness and the colossal.

In this tomb Pr�ault succeeded in symbolizing the impassable frontier separating the world of the living from that of the dead.

In 1868 Pr�ault executed two plaster models, Jupiter and the Sphinx, and Venus and the Sphinx, which were accepted as the basis for stone statues to ornament the garden of an imperial residence at the Palais de Fontainebleau.

French Mannerist art may have guided Pr�ault’s approach, but a drawing he made earlier in Rome shows that it was Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the Sistine Ceiling that directly inspired the pose of Venus here. Jupiter’s features are borrowed from an ancient statue of Mausolus carved for that ruler’s tomb at Halicarnassus.

In placing the figures of deities on the backs of fabled creatures, Pr�ault was following antique and Renaissance precedents - like other late nineteenth-century artists - but his manner of doing so broke all rules. The figures’ poses are tense and awkward, and their musculature exaggerated.

The Franco-Prussian War intervened, and the stone versions were not carved and installed until 1872.

French Mannerist art may have guided Pr�ault’s approach, but a drawing he made earlier in Rome shows that it was Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the Sistine Ceiling that directly inspired the pose of Venus here.

In placing the figures of deities on the backs of fabled creatures, Pr�ault was following antique and Renaissance precedents - like other late nineteenth-century artists - but his manner of doing so broke all rules. The figures’ poses are tense and awkward, and their musculature exaggerated.