Jean-Jacques Caffieri

Jean-Jacques Caffieri, 1784 portrayed by Adolf Wertmüller ( Museum of Fine Arts, Boston )

Benjamin Franklin , bust of Jean-Jacques Caffieri in the Franklin Institute

Jean-Jacques Caffieri (born April 29, 1725 in Paris , † June 21, 1792 there ) was a French sculptor .

Life

Jean-Jacques Caffieri's father, the French sculptor Jacques Caffieri , was born in Paris in 1678 as the youngest son of the Italian sculptor Philippe Caffieri . Jean-Jacques' grandfather, born in Rome in 1634 , immigrated to Paris in the wake of Cardinal Mazarin, who ruled France from 1642 to 1661 .

Initially, Jean-Jacques Caffieri and his older brother Philippe Caffieri (1714–1774) were trained by their father and in the studio of the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne (1704–1778). In 1748 Jean-Jacques Caffieri won the Prix ​​de Rome of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and was thus allowed to work at the Villa Medici as a scholarship holder from 1749 to 1753 . During his stay in Italy he became acquainted with the painters Jean François de Troy and Charles-Joseph Natoire . After returning to France in 1759 he became a member of the above-mentioned academy. For the foyer of the Comédie-Française he created busts of well-known authors from the 17th century - such as Molière , Jean Racine , Pierre Corneille , Thomas Corneille , Philippe Quinault and Jean de La Fontaine . Of course, Jean-Jacques Caffieri also took on contemporaries - for example the musician Jean-Philippe Rameau . Today he is placed on a par with his rival Jean-Antoine Houdon . Louis XV appointed him his court sculptor.

One of his students was Jean-Joseph Foucou (1739-1821). Jean-Jacques Caffieri remained single and childless.

Works in public collections (selection)

• Musée des Beaux-Arts (Dijon) : bust of Jean-Philippe Rameau 1760.
• Musée des Arts décoratifs (Paris) : bust of Dr. Borie 1767.
• Louvre , Paris:
  • Un Fleuve , 1759.
  • Bust of Alexandre Guy Pingre , 1789.
• Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York: bust of Louis Nicolas Victor de Félix d'Ollières , 1776.

literature

• Henri Auguste Jouin: Jean-Jacques Caffiéri. Sculpteur du roi (1725-1792). L'Artiste, Paris 1891.
• Conrad de Mandach : Jean-Jacques Caffieri . In: Ulrich Thieme (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists from Antiquity to the Present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 5 : Brewer-Carlingen . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1911, p. 353-354 ( Text Archive - Internet Archive ).
• Cécile Navarra-Le Bihan: L'inventaire après décès du sculpteur Jean-Jacques Caffieri. In: Gazette des beaux-arts. 138, 2001, pp. 97-120.

Web links

Commons : Jean-Jacques Caffieri  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Jean-Jacques Caffieri in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Works on artnet.com
• Works at Bridgeman
• Works in the French sculpture census