Marie-Anne Collot

She was the student and daughter-in-law of Étienne Falconet and is most well known as a portraitist, close to the philosophic and artistic circles of Diderot and Catherine the Great.

Marie-Anne Collot was born in Paris and started to work as a model at the age of 15 in the workshop of Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne.

Her first works consisted of terracotta busts of Falconet's friends including Diderot, the actor Préville in the role of Sganarelle in “Le médecin malgré lui” by Molière, and Prince Dimitri Alexeievich Galitzine, Russian ambassador.

Marie-Anne also created the plaster model that was selected for the Peter the Great's head for the statue, after Catherine had rejected three attempts by Falconet.

[2] In December of the same year she presented her work to the Imperial Academy of Arts, of which she was elected a member on 20 January 1767.

Also several of the Empress herself, the Grand Duke Paul I and his wife the Grand Duchess Natalia, as well as marble medallions of historical characters and people associated with the Russian court; Peter the Great, the Empress Elizabeth, and Lady Cathcart, the wife of Lord Cathcart, British Ambassador to Russia.

Collot gave up sculpting completely, concentrating from then on her daughter's education and helping her father-in-law who had fallen gravely ill. She continued to do so until his death in 1791.

With her master, her husband and her friends having died, in 1791 Madame Falconet bought a country estate at Marimont, near the village of Bourdonnay in Moselle, France.