Martin Desjardins

He was accepted in 1661 into the Académie de Saint-Luc as "Martin Desjardins" (a translation of his Dutch name "of the orchard"), and gained a reputation executing private commissions for funerary monuments.

From this time he received royal commissions, at Les Invalides and at Versailles, where iconographic treatment and design were tightly controlled and the sculptor was often presented with a sketch or working drawing to follow.

His monument to Louis XIV's victories on the Place des Victoires in Paris included bronze representations of Four Captive Nations (1682–85), celebrating the early victories of the armies of Louis XIV over the alliances of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Brandenburg and the Dutch Republic.

A commission for a third equestrian monument, for Aix-en-Provence, came to nothing; when the Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger visited Desjardins in 1687, the sculptor described to him the project he had had in mind, for the king on a rearing horse that would have been supported on its hind legs and tail.

After his death, in Paris, his nephew Jacques Desjardins continued the atelier, providing the cultural agents of the Swedish crown with plaster models that were the basis in the 1740s, of an equestrian monument of Karl XII of Sweden (Patricia Wengraf, see link).