It is perhaps François-Joseph Bosio’s best-known work. Classically inspired and wearing a flower garland on her head, this naiad with an expressionless face and pure, youthful lines, is sitting by water. She is also known by the title The Nymph Salmacis Emerging from the Bath. The marble stat...
It is perhaps François-Joseph Bosio’s best-known work. Classically inspired and wearing a flower garland on her head, this naiad with an expressionless face and pure, youthful lines, is sitting by water. She is also known by the title The Nymph Salmacis Emerging from the Bath. The marble statue, created by the Monegasque sculptor in 1836, is kept at the Louvre. The Nymph Salmacis was chosen by Prince Rainier III to be reproduced and awarded as a prize at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival.
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.
