Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne

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For the governor of New France, see Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville.

Vertumnus and Pomona, 1760

Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne (1704 - 1778) was a French sculptor. He was the pupil of his father, Jean-Louis Lemoyne, and of Robert Le Lorrain.

He was a great figure in his day, around whose modest and kindly personality there waged opposing storms of denunciation and applause. Although his disregard of the classic tradition and of the essentials of dignified sculpture, as well as his lack of firmness and of intellectual grasp of the larger principles of his art, lay him open to stringent criticism, de Clarac's charge that he had delivered a mortal blow at sculpture is altogether exaggerated.

Lemoyne's more important works have for the most part been destroyed or have disappeared. The equestrian statue of Louis XV for the military school, and the composition of Pierre Mignard's daughter, Mme Feuquières, kneeling before her father's bust (which bust was by Coysevox) were subjected to the violence by which Bouchardon's equestrian monument of Louis XIV was destroyed. The panels only have been preserved.

Bust of Mlle Dangeville as Thalia, 1761

In his busts evidence of his riotous and florid imagination to a great extent disappears, and we have a remarkable series of important portraits, of which those of women are perhaps the best. Among Lemoyne's leading achievements in this class are Fontenelle (at Versailles), Voltaire, Latour (all of 1748), the duc de la Vallière (Versailles), Comte de Saint-Florentin, and Crébillon (Dijon Museum); the actresses Mlle Chiron and Mlle Dangeville (illustration, left), both produced in 1761 and both at the Théâtre Français in Paris, and Madame de Pompadour, the work of the same year. Of Pompadour he also executed a statue in the costume of a nymph, very delicate and playful in its air of grace. Lemoyne was perhaps most successful in his training of pupils, one of the leaders of whom was Étienne Maurice Falconet.