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(b Copenhagen, Sept 11, 1743; d Frederiksdal, Copenhagen, June 4, 1809).

Danish painter, designer and architect. His paintings reveal both Neo-classical and Romantic interests and include history paintings as well as literary and mythological works. The variety of his subject-matter reflects his wide learning, a feature further evidenced by the broad range of his creative output. In addition to painting, he produced decorative work, sculpture and furniture designs, as well as being engaged as an architect. Successfully combining both intellectual and imaginative powers, he came to be fully appreciated only in the 1980s.

He studied at the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi in Copenhagen (1764–72), and in 1767 he assisted Johan Edvard Mandelberg (1730–86) in painting the domed hall of the Fredensborg Slot with scenes from the Homeric epic the Iliad. In 1772 he was granted a five-year travelling scholarship from the Kunstakademi to study in Rome. During his Roman sojourn he extensively copied works of art from the period of antiquity up to that of the Carracci family. His friendships with the Danish painter Jens Juel, the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel and the Swiss painter Johann Heinrich Fuseli placed him among artists who were in the mainstream of a widespread upheaval in European art. In these years Abildgaard developed both Neo-classical and Romantic tastes; his masterpiece of the period is ...

(b Tarazona, 1741; d Madrid, 1816).

Spanish sculptor. He was trained in Saragossa with José Ramirez. In 1765 he went to Rome, where he won a scholarship from the Spanish Academia de Bellas Artes and was appointed Director of the Accademia di S Luca, Rome. Adán’s early work became known in Spain through the drawings and sculptures he sent from Rome, the finest being a Lamentation. He returned to Spain in 1776 and worked in Lérida, Granada and Jaen, finally settling in Madrid in 1786. In 1793 he was appointed court sculptor (Escultor de Cámara) by Charles IV (reg 1788–1808). He made many carvings in wood, such as a St Joseph and a Virgin of the Sorrows, for churches in Madrid. Other characteristic works are the portrait busts of leading contemporary figures such as Manuel Godoy, the Prince de la Paz, and José Monino, the Conde de Floridablanca. The busts of Charles IV and Queen Maria Luisa...

(b Logroño, Dec 26, 1759; d Madrid, 1842).

Spanish sculptor and ceramicist. He moved to Madrid at an early age and was apprenticed to the French sculptor Robert Michel (i), who was employed at the court. He won first prize in a competition at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes, and organized the royal workshop for the carving of precious stones, where he executed two magnificent cameo portraits of Charles IV and Queen Maria Luisa (c. 1796; Madrid, Pal. Real). He was a leading sculptor in the Buen Retiro porcelain factory, for which he produced a large amount of work. In 1797 he entered the Real Academia de Bellas Artes and was promoted until he was finally appointed Director-general in 1821. He was also appointed Honorary Chamber Sculptor to Charles IV. His successful career made him an influential figure in Spanish art. He was one of the leading exponents of Neo-classical sculpture, producing works that were technically accomplished although stylistically rather cold. He executed a large amount of work between ...

(b Belas, 1769; d Lisbon, 1841).

Portuguese sculptor. He was probably trained by his father, a stone mason employed at the Palacio Nacional de Queluz, near Lisbon. In 1784 João Aguiar went to the drawing school of the Casa Pia do Castelo, Lisbon, and in 1785 to Rome on a scholarship from the Intendência with the support of D. I. de Pina Manique (1735–1805). There he studied drawing with Tomaso Labruzzi, modelling with Giuseppe Angellini (1735–1811) and then moved to the workshop of Antonio Canova. Aguiar’s first recorded works made in Rome were Cippus, Aeneas and Creusa (1792–3; Lisbon, Pal. Belém Gdns) and a portrait medallion of Giovanni Antinori (1792; untraced), Professor of Architecture at the Academia de Portugal in Rome, which is known from an engraving (1792) by João Caetano Rivara (studying in Rome, 1788–99).

In 1794 Pina Manique was engaged on a project to erect a monument to Queen Mary I that would also celebrate the achievements of Portuguese artists who had received scholarships to study in Rome. After finding that Canova and the Genoese Nicolò Stefano Traverso would be too expensive, he turned to Aguiar for the statues and bas-reliefs and to ...

(b Tarragona, 1832; d Barcelona, 1901).

Spanish sculptor. He entered the Escuela de Bellas Artes de la Lonja, Barcelona, when still very young and was a student of the Neo-classical artist Damián Campeny y Estrany, who was also influenced by Romanticism and naturalism. In 1855 Aleu y Teixidor applied for the Chair in Modelling at the Escuela, a position to which he was eventually appointed after the committee had been involved in intrigues and disputes. He taught Catalan sculptors for half a century and wielded an enormous, though not entirely positive, influence. He became Deputy Director of the Escuela de Bellas Artes, belonged to the Academia de Ciencias y Artes of Barcelona and won first prize at the Exposición Nacional de Madrid in 1871.

Almost all the work of Aleu y Teixidor is in Barcelona. The best is the over life-size stone sculpture of St George (1871) for the façade of the Palau de la ...

(b Salamanca, 1727; d Madrid, 1797).

Spanish sculptor. He was a member of the first generation of sculptors trained at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Fernando, Madrid. He won a scholarship to Rome, which he was unable to take up for health reasons. His knowledge of Classical sculpture won him the nickname of ‘el Griego’, although the influence of the Rococo is also evident in his work. In the Spanish tradition he carved in wood as much as in stone.

Alvarez de la Peña took part in the programme of decoration for the Palacio Real, Madrid, to which he contributed statues of kings (c. 1750) and a relief, Council of War (c. 1760). In 1762–5 he carved three medallions with scenes from the Life of the Virgin and a series of saints and angels, all for the chapel of the Virgin in the church of Nuestra Señora del Pilar, Saragossa. The elegant Fountain of Apollo (...

(b Nivelles, Sept 14, 1730; d ?Brussels, end 1771).

South Netherlandish sculptor. He served his apprenticeship at Nivelles with Laurent Delvaux, with whom he collaborated on a series of statues of Apostles in oak for the collegiate church of Ste Gertrude. Between c. 1757 and c. 1761 he made a monumental stone group of Neptune with Aeolus and Amphitrite, commissioned by Claude Lamoral II, Prince of Ligne (1685–1766), for the ornamental lake of the château of Beloeil, Hainaut. In 1761 Anrion was given the title of Court Sculptor by Charles of Lorraine (1712–80), the Austrian Governor of the Netherlands. From 1766 he worked under the direction of the architect Laurent-Benoît Dewez on the decoration of Charles’s new palace in Brussels. Anrion’s most important contribution to the work was 12 low reliefs of the Labours of Hercules (gilt-bronze; untraced) for the main staircase. During the same period he executed sculptures for the high altar of the Benedictine abbey church of Afflighem in Brabant, which was being renovated by Dewez. These included marble statues of ...

(b Dôle, Jura, Dec 14, 1728; d Dôle, July 15, 1804).

French sculptor. He was the son of a joiner, who sent him to Paris to train with Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. In 1757 Attiret was in Rome, where he received a prize from the Accademia di S Luca; returning to Paris, he was accepted as a member of the Académie de St Luc in 1760, and was a professor there. He exhibited several times at the Salon of the Académie de St Luc: among the works that he showed was Roman Charity (terracotta, 1726; Dijon, Mus. B.-A.); Hannibal Preparing to Take Poison (terracotta, 1764); and the Chercheuse d’esprit (terracotta, 1774; Dijon, Mus. B.-A.; marble version, Paris, David–Weill col.). This idealized portrait bust of a young woman, graceful in concept and mischievous in expression, is his best-known work.

By 1776 Attiret had settled in Dijon and had executed two stone statues for St Bénigne, St Andrew and St John the Evangelist, and a bronze low relief of the ...

(b New Haven, CT, Feb 21, 1791; d New Haven, CT, Jan 10, 1858).

American sculptor. Although as a youth he showed talent for handling tools, his father, a joiner and carpenter, discouraged him from becoming a wood-carver. After opening a fruit shop in New Haven, he began carving musical instruments and furniture legs for a local cabinetmaker. With his invention of a lace-making machine, he was able to settle his business debts and devote himself entirely to sculpture.

About 1825 Samuel F. B. Morse encouraged Augur to try working in marble. Among his earliest attempts in this medium was a bust of Professor Alexander Metcalf Fisher (c. 1825–7; New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.), which was exhibited in 1827 at the National Academy of Design in New York. The impact of the Neo-classical style is clearly evident in his most ambitious work, Jephthah and his Daughter (c. 1828–30; New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.), a pair of free-standing half life-size marble figures. The treatment of the heads shows Roman influence, which Augur must have absorbed from engravings; this is borne out by the detailed work on Jephthah’s armour. The bold handling of the hair and drapery reveals his experience as a wood-carver. In ...

(b Quebec, c. Jan 21, 1759; d Quebec, Sept 15, 1830).

Canadian sculptor, architect and painter, elder son of Jean Baillairgé. From his youth, his intellectual promise and manual dexterity attracted attention. Although relations between the mother country and New France had been severed for almost two decades, François’s father obtained the support of the Séminaire de Québec to send him to Paris from 1778 to 1781 to study at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. On his return, Baillairgé displayed his virtuosity on a wide range of projects, including classically inspired altarpieces and retables, large religious paintings, such as his work in the church of Sainte-Famille on the Ile d’Orléans, carved figureheads for ships and decorative works such as the coat of arms for the carriage of Edward, Duke of Kent. Among the best of his richly carved church interiors are Notre-Dame de Bonsecours (1782–6) at L’Islet, St Ambroise de la Jeune Lorette (1810–16), Loretteville, and St Joachim (...

(b Quebec, c. Dec 20, 1791; d Quebec, Feb 9, 1859).

Canadian architect and sculptor, son of François Baillairgé. Influenced by his father and grandfather, he refined the design of classical churches in Quebec to its most satisfying and cohesive form. He blended the Renaissance classical tradition in which he had been trained with more current strains of French and English Neo-classicism, integrating all the elements into unified compositions. His majestic chancel (1816–29) in St Joachim, Montmorency, where he worked with his father, featured an inner ring of magnificent life-sized statues alternating with ornate gilded columns. His carefully composed twin-towered church façades were particularly innovative; examples include his addition (1843) to Notre-Dame Cathedral in Quebec, Ste Geneviève (1844), Pierrefonds, in Québec province, and St Roch (1845), Quebec. Thomas Baillairgé’s designs for churches showed considerable variety, and he was arguably the greatest church architect of French Canada, influencing generations of designers to the end of the 19th century. In his wood carvings for church interiors, he preferred symbolic designs to narrative....

(b Bristol, March 10, 1788; d London, May 22, 1867).

English sculptor and designer . He was the son of a ship’s carver and began his career as ‘a modeller of small busts in wax’. He spent seven years in John Flaxman’s studio, acknowledged as his favourite and most devoted pupil. He attended the Royal Academy Schools, London, won the first silver medal of the Society of Artists and was awarded gold and silver medals by the Royal Academy in 1809 and 1811. He was elected ARA in 1817, the year he exhibited Apollo Discharging Arrows against the Greeks (plaster; destr.). Full membership followed in 1820 with the exhibition of Eve at the Fountain (probably plaster, untraced; marble version, 1822, Bristol, Mus. & A.G.), one of the most famous pieces of British sculpture in the 19th century.

From 1809 Baily worked for the firm of Rundell, Bridge & Rundell, goldsmiths to the royal family, and on Flaxman’s death in 1826 he became Chief Modeller and Designer. In ...

(bapt London, Dec 22, 1735; d London, Feb 2, 1805).

English sculptor. To his contemporaries and immediate heirs, Banks was one of the most original British Neo-classical sculptors, distinguished from John Bacon (i) and Joseph Nollekens by his greater dedication to the antique spirit rather than to the fashionable classical style alone. His persistent efforts to establish a market for modern gallery sculpture were exceptional in an age when most patrons preferred restored antique marbles, replicas, pastiches, busts and memorials. Sir Joshua Reynolds is said to have considered him to be ‘the first British sculptor who had produced works of classic grace’ and John Flaxman ranked him alongside Canova in stature.

The eldest son of William Banks, who became steward to the 4th Duke of Beaufort at Badminton, Thomas Banks attended school in Ross-on-Wye, Hereford & Worcs, then returned to London to be apprenticed for seven years to the mason and ornament-carver William Barlow. He spent his evenings studying in the studio of ...

(b Savignano, nr Prato, Jan 7, 1777; d Florence, Jan 20, 1850).

Italian sculptor and draughtsman. He was one of the most independent-minded sculptors in Italy in the generation after Antonio Canova. His early work is in the Neo-classical style predominant throughout Europe around the turn of the century. While in the Paris studio of Jacques-Louis David he became interested in the art of the Quattrocento, an interest confirmed when he settled in Florence after 1815. His later works combine Neo-classical and neo-Renaissance elements with, particularly in his portraits, a strong taste for naturalism. In 1812 he held a series of classes at the Florentine Accademia di Belle Arti, astonishing his colleagues by instructing his model to take up a series of instantaneous and casual poses, instead of the customary carefully contrived stance taken from a famous work of art. In 1839 he was made a professor at the Accademia, and again overturned traditional academic notions, this time by presenting the pupils in the life class with a hunchbacked model. (For a detailed discussion of Bartolini’s unusual views on the imitation of nature see ...

(b Le Havre, June 21, 1750; d Paris, April 15, 1818).

French sculptor, draughtsman and engraver. He arrived in Paris in 1765 to become a pupil of Augustin Pajou. Although he never won the Prix de Rome, he appears to have travelled to Rome in the early 1770s. About 1780 or 1781 he was involved in the decoration of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s Hôtel Thélusson, Paris. From 1784 to 1785 he carried out work at the château of Compiègne, including the decoration of the Salle des Gardes, where his bas-reliefs illustrating the Battles of Alexander (in situ) pleasantly combine a Neo-classical clarity of composition with a virtuosity and animation that are still Rococo in spirit.

Beauvallet was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in 1789. During the French Revolution he was a passionate republican and presented plaster busts of Marat and of Chalier (1793–4; both destr.) to the Convention. He was briefly imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre in ...

(b Madrid, Feb 23, 1845; d Madrid, Dec 20, 1924).

Spanish sculptor. He was the son of the sculptor Francisco Bellver (1812–89), with whom he undertook his first studies until attending the Madrid Escuela Superior de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado. Ricardo soon started to submit to the Exposiciones Nacionales de Bellas Artes works on historical subjects, such as Tucapel (1862), on mythology, such as Satyr Playing the Flute and a Young Faun Playing with a Goat (both 1864), and others that were religious, such as Piety (1866).

In 1874 Bellver y Ramón obtained a grant to study at the Academia Española de Bellas Artes in Rome; there his most significant works included a bust of Don Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, El Gran Capitán (1453–1515), executed in 1875, and a relief entitled the Burial of St Agnes, which shows traces of Neo-classicism (Madrid, S Francisco el Grande). During this period he sculpted his popular and dynamic ...

(b Gotha, Dec 27, 1725; d Vienna, March 23, 1806).

German sculptor, painter and architect. He was the son of a court gardener who worked first in Gotha and then in Württemberg. He was originally intended to become an architect; in 1747 Duke Charles-Eugene of Württemberg sent him to train in Paris where, under the influence of painters such as Charles-Joseph Natoire and François Boucher, he turned to painting. The eight-year period of study in Rome that followed prompted Beyer to devote himself to sculpture, as he was impressed by antique works of sculpture and was also influenced by his close contacts with Johann Joachim Winckelmann and his circle. He also served an apprenticeship with Filippo della Valle, one of the main representatives of the Neo-classical tendency in sculpture. In 1759 Beyer returned to Germany, to take part in the decoration of Charles-Eugene’s Neues Schloss in Stuttgart.

In Stuttgart Beyer made an important contribution to the founding and improvement of facilities for the training of artists, notably at the Akademie, and to manufacture in the field of arts and crafts, particularly at the ...

(b Carrara, March 2, 1795; d Rome, April 17, 1878).

Italian sculptor. In 1818 he won the Rome Prize at the Accademia di Belle Arti e Liceo Artistico in Carrara and then went to Rome, where he entered Bertel Thorvaldsen’s studio, a centre for the production of sculpture and an important attraction for foreign visitors and clientele. He soon became a popular exponent of his master’s style and, in addition to taking his own commissions, he finished many of Thorvaldsen’s pieces and made authorized copies of his work, for example six copies of Tsar Alexander I (1822). By 1827 he was in charge of the studio. After Thorvaldsen’s death in 1844 he taught at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca and continued to work in both Rome and Carrara, frequently collaborating with his brother Pietro Antonio Bienaimé (1781–1857). In 1839 Prince Alexander of Russia (later Tsar Alexander II) acquired from him his series of figures of ...

(b Schleswig, Oct 13, 1798; d Copenhagen, March 10, 1868).

Danish sculptor. He studied at the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi, Copenhagen, from 1816. Originally intending to become a painter, he decided after a few years to devote himself to sculpture, partly as a result of seeing the works of Bertel Thorvaldsen in Copenhagen in 1819. In 1823 Bissen gained the academy’s grand gold medal and a travelling bursary, and he left for Rome in 1824, making several stops in Germany and Italy en route. He stayed in Rome for over ten years, and as well as making a number of small trips to southern Italy with his friend the sculptor Hermann Ernst Freund, Bissen got the chance to work in Thorvaldsen’s studio in Rome. He eventually became one of Thorvaldsen’s most trusted collaborators, and in 1833–4 he even carried out a commission in Thorvaldsen’s name, the monument to Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz. After Thorvaldsen’s death in 1844 he completed several of his master’s works....

(b Chalon-sur-Saône, Aug 30, 1735; d Paris, Dec 9, 1814).

French sculptor, draughtsman and painter. He probably first trained in Chalon, under the sculptor Pierre Colasson (c. 1724–70); later he studied in Paris at the school of the Académie Royale, under Simon Challes. In 1766 he travelled to Italy, remaining there until 1770. The art of Raphael and his school and the Fontainebleau school influenced Boichet’s art (e.g. Agrippina Bearing Germanicus’s Ashes, Lille, Mus. B.-A.) from an early date by giving his work a Neo-classical character. Boichot next worked in Burgundy, where he was responsible for architecture, sculpture and paintings at the château of Verdun-sur-le-Doubs (destr.). He also produced decorative work for the salon of the Académie de Dijon, of which he was a member; for the refectory of the abbey of St Benigne, Dijon, he executed a painting of the Triumph of Temperance over Gluttony (Dijon, Mus. B.-A.). In Paris his studio was in the Passage Sandrier off the Chaussée d’Antin. Introduced by Augustin Pajou, he was approved (...