Auguste Pr?ault

(b Paris, 9 Oct 1809; d Paris, 11 Jan 1879). French sculptor. He was born in the working-class Marais district of Paris and was apprenticed to an ornamental carver. He later trained in the studio of Pierre-Jean David d'Angers. His first serious sculptural essays were mostly portrait medallions in the manner of David d'Angers. There is also record of an early relief entitled Two Slaves Cutting the Throat of a Young Roman Actor, said to have belonged to Daumier. By the time of his Salon d?but in 1833, Pr?ault was immersed in the socially conscious subject-matter favoured by the liberal Romantics among whom he moved. His 1833 exhibits were Two Poor Women, Beggary and Gilbert Dying in the Hospital (all destr.). In 1834 his Pariahs (also destr.) was refused, presumably because of its pointed social comment, unacceptable in the bourgeois atmosphere of the July monarchy (1830-48). However, his tumultuous plaster relief Slaughter (bronze version, 1854; Chartres, Mus. B.A.) with its emphasis on extreme physical and emotional states was accepted. All these works were broadly and rapidly executed, with bold forms and daring compositions and subjects. Stylistically, they derived less from Pr?ault's teachers and contemporaries than from Michelangelo and his French followers of the 16th and 17th centuries, Germain Pilon, Jean Goujon and Pierre Puget.

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