Auguste Clésinger

Auguste Clésinger
Auguste Clésinger
Born	Jean-Baptiste Auguste Clésinger; 22 October 1814; Besançon, France
Died	5 January 1883 (aged 68); Paris, France
Nationality	French
Known for	Painting and sculpture
Awards	Officier de la Légion d'honneur

Jean-Baptiste Auguste Clésinger (22 October 1814 – 5 January 1883) was a 19th-century French sculptor and painter.

Life

*Woman Bitten by a Serpent*, 1847, marble, Musée d'Orsay

Auguste Clésinger was born in Besançon, in the Doubs department of France. His father, Georges-Philippe, was a sculptor and trained Auguste in art. Auguste first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1843 with a bust of vicomte Jules de Valdahon and last exhibited there in 1864. At the 1847 Salon, he created a sensation with his Woman Bitten by a Serpent, produced from life-casts from his model Apollonie Sabatier (the pose being particularly suitable for such a method), thus reinforcing the scandal with an erotic dimension. Appolonie Sabatier was a salonnière and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire and others. The sculpture's beauty was praised by Théophile Gautier:

Clésinger has resolved this problem of making beauty without cuteness, without affectation, without mannerism, with a head and a body of our own time, in which can be recognised his mistress if she is beautiful.

Clésinger also portrayed Sabatier as herself, in an 1847 marble sculpture now in the Musée d'Orsay.

He produced busts of Rachel Félix and of Théophile Gautier, and a statue of Louise of Savoy (now in the Jardin du Luxembourg). He received the knight's cross of the Légion d'honneur in 1849 and rose to an officer of the order in 1864. In 1847, he married George Sand's daughter, Solange Dudevant. In 1849, the couple had a daughter, Jeanne, nicknamed Nini, who died in 1855 shortly after her parents' separation.

At the death of the composer-pianist Frédéric Chopin on 17 October 1849, Clésinger made Chopin's death mask and a cast of his hands. He also sculpted, in 1850, the white marble funerary monument of Euterpe, the muse of music, for Chopin's grave at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris.

Clésinger died in Paris on 5 January 1883. He is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery (division 10). His heir was his model and mistress Berthe de Courrière.

Selected works

1847 : Woman Bitten by a Serpent, marble, Musée d'Orsay
1848 : Bacchante, a variation after the Woman bitten by a serpent, marble, Musée du Petit-Palais
1847 : Louise of Savoy, stone statue, Jardin du Luxembourg
1857 : Battle of the Roman bulls, painted plaster, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Besançon
1857 : The infant Hercules strangling the serpents of Envy, bronze, Musée d'Orsay
1869 : Nereid groupe en marbre, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'archéologie de Besançon
1854 : Sappho, plaster, Musée municipal de Châlons-en-Champagne
1865 : Femme à la rose, bronze, Musée d'Orsay

Biblical art

He produced life-size statues for the side chapels of the Église de la Madeleine in Besançon, of the Via Dolorosa, the Pietà, the Entombment, the Resurrection and ascension.