François-Joseph Bosio was born in Monaco in 1768. Prince Honoré III sent him to Paris to study alongside Augustin Pajou. He travelled to Italy and finally settled in France in 1807. He was presented to the Empress Josephine and was entrusted with many commissions. A sought-after portrait artist,...
François-Joseph Bosio was born in Monaco in 1768. Prince Honoré III sent him to Paris to study alongside Augustin Pajou. He travelled to Italy and finally settled in France in 1807. He was presented to the Empress Josephine and was entrusted with many commissions. A sought-after portrait artist, he sculpted the bust of Napoleon I, the Empress, her daughter Hortense and the King of Rome. During the Restoration, he was appointed Chief Sculptor to the King and made a baron. A member of the Institute in 1816, he was appointed as a teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1817. His monumental works include the equestrian sculpture of Louis XIV on Place des Victoires in Paris and the Quadriga of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel in the Jardin des Tuileries. Held as part of the Louvre’s collections, the statue of Henry IV as a Child (1824) and the marble Nymph Salmacis (1836) are among his most remarkable pieces. François-Joseph Bosio died in Paris in 1845. A plaster bust of Baron Bosio was produced in 1847 by Astyanax-Scevola Bosio, known as “Nephew Bosio”. In 1869, the bust was executed in marble. The bronze was cast in the twentieth century by the Susse Foundry in Paris.
The son of painter Jean-Baptiste Bosio and a student of his uncle, sculptor François-Joseph Bosio, Astyanax-Scevola Bosio was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1817. He made his debut at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in 1831 where he exhibited until 1863. Among his most significant works are: his statue of Saint Adelaide at the Church of La Madeleine in Paris, one of the bas-reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe and four caryatids on the Louvre Palace. He is also responsible for the busts of the Duke of Joyeuse, the sculptor Antoine Coysevox, the painter Charles Lebrun (Versailles Museum) and his uncle François-Joseph Bosio. He was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1857. Nephew Bosio died in Paris in 1876.
