Antonin-Marie Moine (French, 1796 to 1849)
Sculptor Antonin-Marie Moine, was born in St. Etienne on June 30, 1796. He studied painting in Lyon before entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1817, where he was a student of Girodet and later – his greatest mentor – the renowned Baron Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835). His first showing at the Salon was in 1831, where he exhibited regularly thereafter.
iAmong his better-known works are a bust of Queen Marie-Amelie at the Petit-Palais des Champs-Elysees, various sculptures at the Place de la Concorde fountain and the facade of the old Hotel de Ville, and his 1848 bust of Fragonard which was accepted in the Louvre in 1851.
His sculpture “Chactas” represents both an homage to his tutor Girodet, and one of a series of literary figures by the artist which also included Don Quixote and Esmerelda from Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris.
“Chactas” was one of Moine’s most popular models, perhaps made all the more so because of the artist’s tragic suicide in Paris on March 18, 1849. (Said by a contemporary to be of a character “nervoux, frele, et timore”, Moine was also distraught over declining commissions; his suicide was thought by some to be the ultimate homage to his mentor Baron Gros, who took his own life in the waters of the Seine.)
Information courtesy of New Orleans Auction, September 2007.