Joseph Mezzara

Joseph Ernest Amédée Mezzara (2 March 1820 – 12 July 1901)[1] was a Franco-American sculptor.

Born in New York, his parents Thomas François Gaspard Mezzara (1774-1845) and Marie Angélique Foulon were both painters.

[2] The Mezzara family alternated between France and America, but Joseph spent most of his youth in Paris, where he took lessons from the painters Jean-Pierre Granger and Ary Scheffer and the sculptor Pierre-Jean David d'Angers and from 1852 to 1875 exhibited at the Paris Salon.

His works included a bust of Alfred de Musset in 1868, now in the foyer of the Comédie-Française.

[3] After Scheffer's death in 1858, he and Scheffer's daughter Cornélia Scheffer took over the designing of a monument to Ary in his native Dordrecht from Auguste Bartholdi - this became the Netherlands' first monument to a contemporary artist on its inauguration in 1862 in Mezzara's presence and was listed as a national monument in 2001.