French sculptor. He was a pupil of Guillaume II Coustou, son of the great French Baroque sculptor Guillaume Coustou. His reception piece for the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1785, the Death of Abel, shows Cain's victim sprawled full-length on the ground (Louvre Museum). Jean-Baptiste Stouf was one of the great sculptors of the 18th century, recognized for his extreme virtuosity in both marble and terracotta. Unlike almost all of his contemporaries, including Houdon and Boizot, Stouf never submitted to the linear intensity of the Empire but instead steadfastly held to a pre-revolutionary style that anticipated the Romanticism of the 19th century. His work exudes a natural purity of form and expression that was born of the intellectual climate pioneered by Rousseau and Diderot. //