Swiss sculptor, painter and composer. Prompted by his early
displays of artistic talent, Pradier's parents placed him
in the workshop of a jeweller, where he learnt engraving
on metal. He attended drawing classes in Geneva, before
leaving for Paris in 1807. By 1811 he was registered at
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and subsequently entered its sculpture
competitions as a pupil of François-Frédéric,
Baron Lemot. A more significant contribution to his artistic
formation around this time was the guidance of the painter
François Gérard. Pradier won the Prix de Rome
in 1813 and was resident at the French Academy in Rome,
from 1814 until 1819. On his return to France, he showed
at the Salon of 1819 a group Centaur and Bacchante (untraced)
and a reclining Bacchante (marble; Rouen, Mus. B.-A.). The
latter, borrowing an erotically significant torsion from
the Antique Callipygean Venus, opens the series of sensuous
Classical female subjects that were to become Pradier's
forte. In Psyche (marble, 1824; Paris, Louvre) new ingredients
were added to Pradier's references to the Antique. The critic
and theorist Toussaint-Bernard Emeric-David detected in
it 'a sort of Florentine grace' and a reminiscence of the
16th-century sculptor Jean Goujon. The sophisticated posture
and coiffure, and the contrast between flesh and elaborately
involved and pleated drapery, are features that recur in
most of Pradier's female subjects.
The government of the restored Bourbons (1815-30) conferred
on Pradier a number of prestigious commissions, notably
a marble monument to Jean, Duc de Berry, for the Cathedral
of Versailles (1821-3), and a marble relief for the Arc
de Triomphe du Carrousel (1828-31), Paris. As early as 1827
he was made a member of the Institut and Professor at the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts. This recognition did not secure him
automatic preference in official commissions. His project
for the pediment of the Madeleine (1828-9), for example,
was turned down in favour of one by Henri Lemaire. At all
stages Pradier was strenuous in his pursuit of state commissions.
After 1834 his efforts in this direction were to be powerfully
abetted by the journalism of Victor Hugo. Notoriously apolitical,
Pradier found no difficulty in adapting himself to whatever
regime happened to be in power, an adaptability which, by
the 1848 Revolution, began to look cynical.
Approval of Pradier's art by the July Monarchy (1830-48)
was shown after the Salon of 1831, when Louis-Philippe purchased
his Three Graces (marble; Paris, Louvre). This group invited
comparison with works on the same theme by Canova and Bertel
Thorvaldsen and was an unmistakable gesture of loyalty to
the tenets of Neo-classicism at the start of the decade
that witnessed the emergence of a Romantic style in sculpture.
But Pradier, who has been seen as the 'Ingres of sculpture',
was no doctrinaire. An area in which he showed particular
sympathy with the aspirations of his more overtly Romantic
contemporaries was the production of models for statuettes
and for figures adaptable for ornamental use. The firms
chiefly involved in diffusing his output in this line were
the maison d'éditions Susse Frères and the
founder Salvator Marchi. In his group Satyr and Bacchante
(marble; Paris, Louvre), shown at the Salon of 1834, Pradier
revived in monumental form the explicitly sexual subject-matter
of the 18th century. Such erotic motifs frequently occur
among Pradier's statuettes. Sometimes their subjects are
mythological, as in the undulating Leda and the Swan (plaster;
Geneva, Mus. A. & Hist.). In other works Pradier introduced
a more novel type of voyeuristic genre, as in Woman with
a Cat (plaster, c. 1840; Geneva, Mus. A. & Hist.) or
Woman Putting on a Stocking (bronze, 1840; Paris, Mus. A.
Déc.). The series of Pradier's life-size female statues
culminates in the Nyssia (marble, 1848; Montpellier, Mus.
Fabre) and in the seated Sappho (marble; Paris, Mus. d'Orsay;
see fig.) exhibited at the Salon of 1852, the first illustrating
a modern text, Théophile Gautier's Roi Candaule,
the second bringing a note of 'modern' melancholy to the
treatment of a subject already popularized by Pradier's
Neo-classical forebears, the painters Antoine-Jean Gros
and Anne-Louis Girodet.
Pradier played a major role in many of the ambitious decorative
schemes of the July Monarchy, in particular at the Madeleine
and the Palais Bourbon. For the tomb of Napoleon I at the
Invalides he contributed the 12 severe Victories surrounding
the sarcophagus (1843-52). For Louis-Philippe's historical
galleries at Versailles he executed a number of statues
and busts. However, his initially cordial relations with
the Orléans family were soured by accusations of
commercialism aimed at him by the painter Ary Scheffer.
They may also have been adversely affected by Pradier's
reputation as a philanderer, a myth that his correspondence,
published in 1984, goes far to dispel. However, in the annals
of Romanticism, Pradier the dandy and party-giver has tended
to eclipse Pradier the artist.
Despite aspersions cast by critics on the correctness of
Pradier's treatment of myth, he remained the leading classical
sculptor of his day and exerted a strong influence in the
1840s and 1850s, when a reaction to the turbulent styles
of Romanticism prevailed. The combination of the archaeological
and the hedonistic characterizing the classical sculpture
of the Second Empire (1851-1870) took its main direction
from him.
Throughout his life, Pradier remained in close contact with
his birthplace. In 1830 he obtained a commission from the
town for a bronze statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva,
Ile Rousseau), a task previously offered to Canova. Pradier's
monument was unveiled in 1835. The Musée d'Art et
d'Histoire houses an extensive collection of works by Pradier,
most of which were acquired after his death. These include
oil sketches that indicate an ambition to paint grand mythological
subjects, but, of the paintings that Pradier showed at the
Salon, only a fragment of a Descent from the Cross (exh.
1838; Geneva, Mus. A. & Hist.) survives. A more intimate
and colouristic aspect of Pradier's painting may be glimpsed
in the Virgin and Child (1836; Besançon, Mus. B.-A.
& Archéol.), supposed to be a portrait of his
wife and baby son.
WRITINGS
D. Siler, ed.: James Pradier: Correspondance, 2 vols (Geneva,
1984)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lami
A. Etex: James Pradier: Etude sur sa vie et ses ouvrages
(Paris, 1859)
Romantics to Rodin (exh. cat., ed. P. Fusco and H. Janson;
Los Angeles, Co. Mus. A., 1980)
Statues de chair: Sculptures de James Pradier (exh. cat.,
ed. J. de Caso; Geneva, Mus. A. & Hist.; Paris, Luxembourg
Pal.; 1985-6)
La Sculpture française au XIXe siècle (exh.
cat., ed. A. Pingeot; Paris, Grand Pal., 1986)
