Joseph Chinard

He received his early training in Lyon, as a painter, in the government-supported École Royale de Dessin, then worked with a local sculptor.

He returned to Rome again in 1791, when his activities sometimes drew the attention of the authorities, especially given his espousal of Revolutionary ideas during the French Revolution; in 1791 he was interned in the Castel Sant'Angelo for two months, on the orders of the Pope, for an action that were viewed as subversive, the exhibition in terracotta of a model for the base of a candelabrum in which Apollo trampled underfoot Superstition.

On one occasion in Paris he produced the bust of Mme Récamier (now at the J. Paul Getty Museum), which was reproduced in marble.

Chinard sculpted a terra cotta bust of Pierre-Pomponne-Amédée Pocholle, which was exhibited in the Exposition Universelle of 1878 at the Palais du Trocadéro, in the section of Portraits Nationaux (catalogue number 440).

Interest in Chinard was revived with a retrospective of his sculpture at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1909–10.