Jacques-Léonard Maillet

Maillet was born in Paris, the son of a menuisier, or carver of furniture and panelling, of the working-class district, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

[3] His earliest training had been in a drawing school in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, before he entered the école des Beaux-Arts at the age of seventeen, 1 October 1840.

[4] There he studied with Jean-Jacques Feuchère, the heir of Pierre-Philippe Thomire Napoleon's official maker of bronzes d'ameublement[5] winning a second prize in the Prix de Rome, 1841.

[6] In 1847 he received the premier grand prix de Rome on the given subject, Telemachus bringing back to Phalantes the ashes of Hippias[7] and spent four years[8] as a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome, which was the entry to every public career in sculpture in nineteenth-century France.

[10] In 1851, he returned to France, where he married Adrienne Désirée Vare, 31 December 1856; they had three daughters before separating; Mme Maillet raised her girls at Précy-sur-Oise.