Apollonie Sabatier

Vocation

Notable

French courtesan, artists' muse and bohémienne in 1850s Paris. She hosted a salon in Paris on Rue Frochot, where she met nearly all of the French artists of her time. She was sculpted by Auguste Clésinger as 'Woman bitten by a snake in 1847', today in Musée d'Orsay. Gustave Flaubert, Théophile Gautier and some others have written articles about her and she was one of four women (Caroline, Jeanne Duval, herself and Marie Daubrun) who inspired Charles Baudelaire's famous work Les Fleurs du Mal. Edmond de Goncourt was the first to nickname her 'La Présidente'. In Gustave Courbet's painting L'Atelier du peintre she is said to be shown together with her longtime lover, the Belgian tycoon Alfred Mosselman (1810-1867). After his death she was the longtime mistress to art collector and donor to the Wallace fountains, Sir Richard Wallace, 1st Baronet. She also entered works for the Paris Salon, and was among the artists rejected from the 1863 exhibition who chose to show their works in the Salon des Refusés. Link to Wikipedia biography