French sculptor. He trained with Jean-Baptiste Pigalle and also from 1773 at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, but, despite his undoubted talents as a sculptor, he never became an academician. In 1777 he set up on his own in Paris and was soon in fashionable demand, producing portraits such as that of Mlle d'Oligny (terracotta, 1778; Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris). Portraits of actors, such as his bust of Préville as Figaro (patinated plaster, 1782) or the statuette of Mme de Saint-Huberty as Dido (plaster, 1784; both Musée du Louvre, Paris), show a responsive delicacy, but the uncompromising realism of his portraiture is seen at its best in the powerful busts of his patron Honoré Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, whom he sculpted in plaster in 1781 and 1790 (private collections) and in marble in 1791 (Musée Arbaud, Aix-en-Provence). From 1781 to 1792 Lucas produced a series of plaster and terracotta statuettes of mythological subjects and historical characters, now all lost. During the French Revolution he sculpted many important contemporary political and cultural figures sat for him and he exhibited several sculptures at the Académie des Beaux-Arts salon. //