Pierre Paul Puget

Pierre Paul Puget.

Pierre Paul Puget (October 31, 1622 – December 2, 1694) was a French painter, sculptor, architect and engineer.

Biography

He was born in Marseille.

At the age of fourteen he carved the ornaments of the galleys built in the shipyards of his native city, and at sixteen the decoration and construction of a ship were entrusted to him. Soon after he went to Italy on foot, and was well received at Rome by Pietro da Cortona, who employed him on the ceilings of the Palazzo Barberini and on those of Palazzo Pitti at Florence.

In 1643 he returned to Marseille, where he painted portraits and carved the colossal figure-heads of men-of-war. After a second journey to Italy in 1646 he painted a great number of pictures for Aix-en-Provence, Toulon, Cuers and La Ciotat, and sculpted a large marble group of the Virgin and Child for the church of Lorgues. His caryatids for the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville of Toulon were executed between 1655 and 1657. He also created a monumental wooden retable for Toulon Cathedral.

Perseus and Andromeda (Musée du Louvre)

Nicolas Fouquet employed Puget to sculpt a Hercules for his château, Vaux-le-Vicomte. After the fall of Fouquet in 1660, Puget moved to Genoa. Here he crafted for François Sublet des Noyers his Hercule Gaulois (Musée du Louvre), the statues of St Sebastian and of Alexandre Sauli in the church of Santa Maria di Carignano (c. 1664), and many other works. The Doria family gave him a church to build. The Genoese senate proposed that he should paint their council chamber. The artist's desire to paint gradually subsided before his passion for sculpture, and a serious illness in 1665 brought Puget a prohibition from the doctors which caused him wholly to put aside the brush.

Caryatid of the City Hall of Toulon, France.

Retable in Toulon Cathedral

But Jean-Baptiste Colbert bade Puget return to France, and in 1669 he again took up his old work in the dockyards of Toulon. The arsenal which he had undertaken to construct there under the orders of the duke of Beaufort was destroyed by fire. Disheartened, Puget took leave of Toulon, and in 1685 went back to Marseille, where he continued the long series of works of sculpture on which he had been employed by Colbert. His statue of Milo of Croton (Louvre) had been completed in 1682, Perseus and Andromeda (Louvre) in 1684; and Alexander and Diogenes (bas-relief, Louvre) in 1685, but, in spite of the personal favour which he enjoyed, Puget, on coming to Paris in 1688 to push forward the execution of an equestrian statue of Louis XIV, found court intrigues too much for him. He was forced to abandon his project and retire to Marseille, where he remained till his death. His last work, a bas-relief of the "Plague of Milan", which remained unfinished, was placed in the council chamber of the town hall of his native city.

In spite of Puget's visits to Paris and Rome his work never lost its local character: his Hercules is fresh from the galleys of Toulon; his saints and virgins are men and women who speak Provençal. His best work, the St Sebastian at Genoa, though a little heavy in parts, shows admirable energy and life, as well as great skill in contrasting the decorative accessories with the simple surface of the nude. There is in the museum of Aix-en-Provence the bust of a long-haired young man in pseudoclassical costume which is believed to be a portrait of Louis XIV made by Puget at the time of the king's visit in 1660.

Pierre Puget was and still is quite famous in Marseille. The Mont Puget, one of the mountain ranges bordering Marseille, is named after him.

• Pierre Paul Puget at Gallery of Art

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References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• See Leon Lagrange, Pierre Puget (Paris, 1868, with a catalogue of works); Charles Ginoux, Annales de la vie de P. Puget (Paris, 1894); Philippe Auquier, Pierre Puget ... biographie critique (Paris, 1903).
•  "Pierre Puget". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Pierre_Puget.