GUILLAUME BOICHOT

Boichot (30 August 1735 - 9 December 1814) was both a painter and a sculptor but mainly produced sculptures.  Today his many extant Neoclassical drawings are admired above all.  Although a student of Simon Challe (1719-1765) in Paris, Boichot is regarded primarily as self-taught.  An art lover named Barault took Boichot under his wing.  The young student admired Michelangelo and Raphael and read Leonardo’s treatises and visited a surgeon to study anatomy. But his father advised him to become a sculptor and architect, and to abandon painting.  Early on, Boichot did decorative paintings in the private town house of Guichard-Pontheret.  At the Academy Boichot attained the rank of agréé in 1788 with Diomedes Carrying off the Palladium, and a year later he became a full academician.  On the other hand, he lost the coveted Grand Prix but went to Italy anyway, where English patrons had him execute copies of Antique sculpture.  In 1770/71 he returned to France: immediately he began work on another château, that of the Marquis de Pons at Verdun-sur-le-Doubs.  He painted decoration on the monumental staircase and sculpted a Bacchus and Ceres. 

Dated around 1772 is a medallion from this château, titled La source or Divinité des eaux, which is an elegant female nude in a neo-Mannerist style.  Boichot was an admirer of the School of Fontainebleau and Florentine Mannerist art during a period in which Mannerism was looked down upon.  Namely, the art historian Eméric-David, writing in 1853 but still indoctrinated by Neoclassical theories, told how Boichot was “fooled” in his falling for the Florentine manner, “substituting the grace of Primaticcio for that of Praxiteles.”  Before 1773 Boichot finished a group of angels behind the main altar of the Church of S. Marcel-lès-Chalon, which Pope Pius VII reportedly admired.  Two years later Boichot finished reliefs for the Academy of Dijon.  While in Dijon he completed a plaster bas-relief of a bizarre subject: The Triumph of Temperance over Gluttony  -- for a dining room in the Benedictine convent (now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon). Another work of the Ancien Régime was a Holy Family for the Cathedral of Montauban (1784).

During the Revolution, Boichot took part in the politically correct iconography, for instance, his relief: The Declaration of the Rights of Man was placed above the main entrance of the Panthéon, the building that was formerly the church of Ste. Geneviève.  Boichot’s bronze Hercules or Strength, in the Los Angeles County Museum, is a model for one of the six colossal statues placed along the portico of the Panthéon. The sculptor exhibited a model in the Salon of 1795, the year in which he was appointed professor at the Ecole Centrale de Saône-et-Loire at Autun. The description in the catalogue adds that the Hercules was a full-sized model (for the 15-foot final version). The obvious source is a Hellenistic Seated Boxer (Museo delle Terme, Rome).  Dowley (1952) pointed out that the colossal model was destroyed during the Restoration.  At that time the building became a church once more.  Boichot continued to accept commissions from the Church: for example a statue of St. Roch for that saint’s church in Paris (1803).  The museum of Chalon-sur-Saône has Boichot’s plaster bust of Vivant-Denon (1801; Salon of 1802) and a bronze bust of Gauthey (1808).  In 1806 he executed a bust of Michelangelo (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris). Between 1806 and 1810 Boichot contributed his talents to two projects under Napoleon, the Arc de triomphe du Carrousel and the Vendôme Column.  For the former a River Goddess (bas-relief), also in the neo-Mannerist style, was placed in the vault.

SOURCES:
Armand-Calliat, Louis. “Sculptures et dessins de Guillaume Boichot.” Revue des Arts 8 (1958): 229-234; Autour de David: Dessins néoclassiques du musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille. Exh. cat. Lille: 1983, pp. 25-26; Dowley, Francis H. “A Neo-Classic Hercules.” Art Quarterly 15 (Spring 1952): 73-76; Eméric-David, Toussaint-Bernard. Histoire de la sculpture française. Paris: Charpentier, 1853, p. 202; Guillemin, Jules. Guillaume Boichot 1735-1814. Chalon-sur-Saône: Dejussieu, 1868; Hawley, Henry. Neoclassicism: Style and Motif. Exh. cat. The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1964, no. 42; Lebas de Courmont, Charles-Claude. Vie de Guillaume Boichot de l’Académie royale de sculpture. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1823; West, Alison. From Pigalle to Préault: Neoclassicism and the Sublime in French Sculpture 1760-1840. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Sorel, Philippe. “Boichot, Guillaume,” in From David to Ingres: Early 19th century French Artists. The Grove Dictionary of Art Series. London and New York: Grove Art, 2000.
 
Submitted by Michael Preston Worley, Ph.D.