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Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

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The artist that created the masterpiece of Ugolino and His Sons is Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. Born in 1827 in Valenciennes, Nord, he came from a family of masons. Carpeaux was a French sculptor and painter during the Second Empire under Napoleon III. Carpeaux entered the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1844 and studied under the Romantic Sculptor François Rude. In 1850 he abandoned Rude’s studio for Francisque Duret, another teacher at the school that helped Carpeaux receive an honorable mention for his Achilles Wounded in the Heel in the Prix de Rome competition that year. Carpeaux then followed that up with second place for his figure Philoctetes on Lemnos and in 1854 he won the Gran Prix de Rome for his group Hector and His Son Astyanax. …show more content…

The French Ministry of Fine Arts commissioned a bronze cast by Victor Thiébaut and placed it in the Tuileries Gardens and Carpeaux even completed the work in marble and had it displayed at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in Paris, where it won first prize for sculpture. Immediately after the success of Ugolino and His Sons Carpeaux gained important commissions. These included a portrait of the Prince Imperial son of Napoleon III (1864), a sculptural group The Dance (1865) for the facade of Charles Garnier’s CarOpera, the Four Parts of the World Sustaining the Globe for the fountain of Observatory (1867) in the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace. Carpeaux married a twenty-two-year-old daughter of a general in April 1869, they had two sons. Carpeaux was then awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor two months before his death in

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