French sculptor and painter. He studied law and art. After his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts he went to Rome and in 1860 he first contributed busts to the Salon in Paris. For his first exhibited statues, The Infant St John the Baptist and Narcissus at the Bath (1863), he was awarded a medal of the second class. His statue of the Infant St John was bought by the Musée de Luxembourg. A Florentine Singer of the Fifteenth Century (depicted in doublet and hose playing a lute), for a time one of the most reproduced statuettes in Europe, was shown in 1865. The Virgin and Child was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in France in 1867. The Birth of Eve was produced in 1873, and was followed by striking busts of Jean-Jacques Henner, Dr Parrot, Paul Baudry, Louis Pasteur, Charles Gounod and Léon Bonnat, remarkable alike for life, vivacity, likeness, refinement and subtle handling. As a painter he restricted himself mainly to portraiture. My Children (1876) being probably his most noteworthy achievement. In 1873 he became the keeper of the Musée de Luxembourg. He succeeded Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume as director of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878, and Jean-Joseph Perraud as member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He was elected as an honorary foreign academician of the Royal Academy of London in 1895. He is best known for the tomb of General Lamoriciere in Nantes Cathedral and the statue of Joan of Arc in Rheims. //