Auguste Clsigner

Vocation

French sculptor and painter. At the 1847 Paris Salon, he created a sensation with his 'Woman bitten by a serpent' (please see wikilink for a picture) produced from life-casts from his model Apollonie Sabatier (the pose being particularly suitable for such a method), thus reinforcing the scandal with an erotic dimension. Appolonie Sabatier was a salonnière and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire and others. The sculpture's beauty was praised by Théophile Gautier: 'Clésinger has resolved this problem of making beauty without cuteness, without affectation, without mannerism, with a head and a body of our own time, in which can be recognised his mistress if she is beautiful' At the death of the composer-pianist Frédéric Chopin on 17 October 1849, Clésinger made Chopin's death mask and a cast of his hands. He also sculpted, in 1850, the white marble funerary monument of Euterpe, the muse of music, for Chopin's grave at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris. Link to Wikipedia biography