Artist name Salmson, Jean Jules
Sex: m
Artist occupation: sculptor; medallist; illustrator
Geographical data: France
State: France
Date of birth: 1823.07.18
Place of birth: Paris
Date of death: 1902.05.07
Place of death: Coupvray
Place(s) cited: Geneva and Paris
Book source 1: Thieme-Becker XXIX, 1935, 353

Born in Paris, he was the son of a medallion engraver and later studied under Dumont, Ramey and Toussaint and exhibited at the Salon from 1859, winning second-class medals in 1863 and 1867 and becoming a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in the latter year. Some of the bronzes he exhibited at the Salon are La Devideuse, a group greatly inspired by antiquity (1863), groups entitled Phryné devant l'aréopage and Laïs et Démosthène (1870), Chute des Titans, a shield, 60 cm diameter (1891): at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 he showed a statuette entitled Femme à la marguerite. He worked on many important Parisian monuments such as the Opera, the Tuileries, and the Tribunal de Commerce as well as for the City Hall of la Rochelle. He was director of the School of Industrial Arts, Geneva, a corresponding member of the Institut de France (1891) and one of the leading exponents of portrait sculpture at the end of the 19th Century. He produced a number of statuettes of famous people including Shakespeare, Hamlet, Byron, Van Dyck, Walter Scott, Rubens, Washington, Charles 1er, Marie Stuart, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others. He did decorative and ornamental sculpture, busts and statuettes of historical and contemporary French and Swiss personalities, allegorical figures, bas-reliefs and medallions. His best-known work is the Caryatids at the Park Vaudeville Theatre. He published a book about his work in 1892.

Exhibitions
Paris Salon 1863-1900

Museums
Angers
Paris, Orsay
Paris, Opera
Paris, Luxembourg
La Rochelle (Hotel de Ville)
Chamonix
Geneva

References
Kjellberg, Bronzes of the 19th Century
MacKay, Dictionary of Western Sculptors in Bronze
Benezit, Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs, et Graveurs
Thieme-Becker, Allgemeines Künstler Lexikon

Literature
Lami, Dictionnaire des Sculpteurs ect. au 19e s IV (1921) 228 (mit Werkverz und Literature) Bell-Auvray, Dictionnaire Generale etc II 1885.