Georges Saupique
He was a friend of the sculptor Raymond Delamarre and started to show his work at the Salon des artistes français in 1922.
From 1926 he exhibited his work at the Salon des Tuileries and in 1927 the financier Octave Homberg commissioned Saupique to decorate the hall of his office at the Société financière française et coloniale (SFFC) on rue Pasquier in Paris.
Saupique also created several reliefs for the front of the SFFC building on rue Pasquier, and seven of these are still in place.
In 1931 he sculpted the "Fontaine des lions" for the AOF building and decorated the SFFC's pavilion at the Paris Colonial Exhibition.
1935 saw him commissioned to work on four bas-reliefs for the ocean liner "Normandie" and then in 1936 work started on building the Église du Sacré-Cœur in Gentilly for use by the Cité universitaire and Saupique was commissioned to execute several stone sculptures both inside and outside the church including some magnificent bas- reliefs around the main entrance door as well as four bronze angels for the bell tower.
After the war he worked often with Louis Leygue including the massive restoration needed on Reims cathedral by Henri Deneux.
He was the sculptor of one of the bronze works making up the Mémorial de la France combattante at mont Valérien.
[3] Saupique created several decorative works for the passageways of the ocean liner "Normandie" which was broken up in 1942.
One bas-relief depicted the voyage of Eric the Red to Greenland, another the "Normans in Sicilly" and Odin Freya entering the Seine in a fleet of drakkars.
[4] The "Pergola de la Douce France" is located in the gardens of the Tour Guinette in Étampes and was part of a larger composition created in 1925 for the Exposition des Arts décoratifs et industriels.
[11] [12] Sergent Bobillot had been badly injured in the siege of Tuyên Quang (Tonkin) in 1882 and finally died in Hanoi in 1885.
His composition involved allegorical figures representing commerce and industry supporting the Vincennes' coat of arms.
[15][16] Part of the reconstructed Palais de Chaillot for the 1937 Paris exhibition involved bas-reliefs on the blank walls and one of these is by Saupique.
[17][18] To mark the start of the French Fourth Republic, a competition was held to have a bust of Marianne sculpted and Saupique was the winner.
[19] This building was built in 1929 in the Art Déco style by architects Alex and Pierre Fournier as the office of the Société financière française et coloniale and Saupique was commissioned to decorate the façade with reliefs of exotic animals including a camel, an elephant, a crocodile, a tiger and various birds.
Saupique worked on the cathedral's main altar and the tomb of Mgr Julien, Évêque d'Arras.
[28][29] Saupique's bas-relief entitled "la résurrection des poilus" in this church serves as Milon-la-Chapelle's war memorial.
Saupique's sculpture was first shown at the 1922 Salon de la Société des Artistes Français.
It was at Mont Valérien that the Germans shot more than a thousand resistance fighters and hostages between 1940 and 1944 and as part of this memorial are 16 allegorical reliefs in bronze by various sculptors these referring to various acts of heroism during the Second World War.
Saupique's bronze refers to the Casabiance submarine which escaped from the German occupied Toulon harbor on 27 November 1942 and became a symbol of the Free French Naval Forces (FNFL).
[42] The adjudicating committee established to organize Meymac's war memorial received three maquettes from Saupique and chose the work entitled "Le semeur de lauriers" in which a soldier places a sprig of laurel on the grave of a dead comrade.
executed in the art-déco style, the memorial consists of a base which is inscribed with the names of the men of Langres who died fighting for France in the two World Wars.
At the very top of the memorial a figure representing France herself holds a dead soldier wrapped in a shroud.The monument is of Euville stone, was inaugurated in 1922, and was the joint work of Saupique and Aristide Rousaud.
The monument also carries Leclerc's words at Koufra on 1 March 1941 "Jurez de ne déposer les armes que lorsque nos couleurs, nos belles couleurs flotteront sur la cathédrale de Strasbourg" and is also inscribed "Inscriptions on the plinth: G. Saupique scp.
