Emmanuel Fremiet

(1824-1910)

It wasn't surprising that French sculptor Emmanuel Fremiet would take up a career in the Arts, he was surrounded by accomplished artists such as his mother (an artist), his cousin Sophie (a painter) and her husband Francois Rude, who was a famous French sculptor, Emmanuel was excepted at the prestigious Ecole des Artes Decoratifs at the the unheard of age of thirteen. By sixteen he was working as head lithographer for painter Jacques-Christophe Werner. Even as an aspiring artist, it took some doing to convince his Uncle Rude to take him on as a student in his studio. 

It was as a student of Rude's that Fremiet's love of the animal form was explored. He spent his days at the Jardin de Plantes (Zoological Gardens) in Paris, studying the live animals. Occassionally he would even help in the dissecting of the dead ones, giving him the skills to reproduce muscle and bone structure in his later works.

In his early career Fremiet mainly concentrated on small animal bronzes which he cast himself in his own foundry at 42 Boulevard du Temple. At twenty five, fremiet won his first public commission for a monument. He would go on to receive more commissions for public monuments than any other sculptor in France and to which he still holds the honour today.

Disheartened with the outbreak of the Franco Prussian war (1870), Fremiet seriously considered ending his career. Reinspired in 1874 he completed the Jeanne d'Arc statue which was commissioned by Napolean III. Following Fremiet's death in 1910 all of his models were sold to F. Barbedienne, the famous Paris foundry. His bronzes were cast by them up until the First World War and bear the foundry seal.

It could be argued that Emmanuel Fremiet's  great knowledge of the animal form led to his unfortunate problem of never being an extreme perfectionist. He was extremely irritated with the original Jeanne d'Arc statue. Stating that he thought the horse was not of the same scale as the rider. In 1889 the city of Nancy requested a reproduction of the statue. This gave him the opportunity to reduce the size of the horse and make a few other changes including adding a muzzle to hide the horse's head and removing the harness around the rear. The new and improved reproduction, led to the removal of the original statue in Paris. It was replaced about 10 years after it was first erected. However this didn't go unnoticed, creating a stir amongst the people of France and his peers, who believed an artist should never modify a work already displayed in the public.

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