S.A.S. le Prince Albert II

After her greatly moving statue of Princess Grace in 2002, Daphné du Barry realised that of Prince Rainier III in 2007, on the 50th birthday of H.S.H. Prince Albert II of Monaco. The Sovereign visited the artist at her studio in Monaco, to see her put the finishing touches to the clay model, and shared with her some valuable suggestions regarding his father’s facial expression. This series of remarkable pieces would be completed two years later by a third sculpture, this time representing the present Sovereign. No longer having a studio in the Principality, the artist was invited by the Sovereign to create the clay model at his Palace.
“His Serene Highness posed every week. He did not want a solemn monument in official garments, but natural and casual clothing, wearing a blazer and open-necked shirt,” explains the sculptor. This two-metre bronze statue was cast at the foundry of Pietrasanta, in Tuscany.
The work was commissioned by a group of Dutch art patrons, and was officially unveiled in Monaco in the spring of 2009. It now stands in the gardens of the Villa Girasole, headquarters of the Albert II Foundation.

Daphné du Barry is a Dutch artist, born on 5 July 1950 in Arnhem, in the Netherlands. After secondary school, she studied languages in Munich and Montreal. She later spent three years reading modern literature at the Sorbonne. In 1971, at the home of Salvador Dali in Cadaqués, she met the art critic Jean-Claude du Barry, who would become her husband a few years later. After a brief musical career, she studied drawing with the Hungarian master Akos Szabo for five years in Paris. In Florence, she met Marcello Tommasi, one of the main exponents of classical figurative sculpture in Italy, and was a pupil at his studio. She also enrolled at the Academy of Art and Drawing in Florence. She created around a dozen monuments in Europe, earning several awards. Daphné du Barry works in the classical figurative style, with a mastery of fine proportions, the contours of the body, and transcendent expression. Her oeuvre shows a surprising variety of themes, but a unity of style. Her fine appreciation of the human body derives from a quasi-ideal inspiration, but her pieces’ captivating charm lies in the intellectual, rather than the sensual. Daphné du Barry’s work exemplifies the remark famously made by Dominique Ingres: “There are not two arts, there is only one: that which has as its foundation the beautiful, which is eternal and natural.