Antoine Coysevox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Charles Antoine Coysevox (September 29, 1640 - October 10, 1720), French sculptor, was born at Lyon, and belonged to a family which had emigrated from Spain. The name should be pronounced Cozevo.
He was only seventeen when he produced a statue of the Madonna of considerable merit; and having studied under Lous Lerambert and trained himself by taking copies in marble from Roman sculptures (among others from the Venus de Medici and the Castor and Pollux), he was engaged by the bishop of Strasbourg, Cardinal Fürstenberg, to adorn with statuary his château at Saverne (Zabern).
In 1666 he married Marguerite Quillerier, Lerambert's niece, who died a year after the marriage. In 1671, after four years spent on Saverne, which was subsequently destroyed by fire in 1780, he returned to Paris. In 1676 his bust of the painter Charles Le Brun obtained admission for him to the Académie Royale. A year later he married Claude Bourdict.
In consequence of the influence exercised by Le Brun between the years 1677 and 1685, he was employed by Louis XIV in producing much of the decoration and a large number of statues for Versailles; and he afterwards worked, between 1701 and 1709, with no less facility and success, for the Château de Marly, subsequently destroyed in the Revolution.
Among his works are the Mercury and Fame and "Neptune and Amphitrite, made for at Marly and moved in 1719 to the gardens of the Tuileries; for the gardens at Marly; "Justice and Force" at Versailles; and portreait sculptures, in which the likenesses are said to have been remarkably successful, of most of the celebrated men of his age, including Louis XIV and Louis XV at Versailles, Colbert (at Saint-Eustache), Cardinal Mazarin (in the church of the Collège des Quatre-Nations), Condé the Great (in the Louvre), Maria Theresa of Austria, Turenne, Vauban, Cardinals de Bouillon and de Polignac, Fénelon, Racine, Bossuet (in the Louvre), the comte d'Harcourt, Cardinal Fürstenberg and Charles Le Brun (in the Louvre). Coysevox died in Paris 10 October 1720.
Besides the works given above he carved about a dozen funeral monuments, including those to Colbert (at Saint-Eustache), to Cardinal Mazarin (in the Louvre), and to the painter Le Brun (in the church of Saint Nicholas-du-Chardon).
Between 1708 and 1710 Coysevox produced three sculptures for Marly, a Pan (now in the Louvre), flanked by a Flora and a Dryad (in the Tuileries gardens). A terracotta bozzetto of the Dryad, signed and dated 1709, is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Among the pupils of Coysevox were Nicolas and Guillaume Coustou.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- L. Benoist, Coysevox (Paris: Series Les Maîtres de l'art) 1930.
[edit] External links
