Pierre Julien

He served an early apprenticeship at Le Puy-en-Velay, near his natal village of Saint-Paulien, then at the École de dessin of Lyon, then entered the Parisian atelier of Guillaume Coustou the Younger.

In 1765 he won a Prix de Rome for sculpture with a bas-relief panel of a subject from Antiquity and entered the École royale des élèves protégés, which offered a special course of study under the direction of the painter Louis-Michel van Loo.

As pensionnaires were expected to do, he sent back to France a marble copy from the Antique, slightly reduced in scale, of the so-called Cleopatra, the Vatican's Sleeping Ariadne,[1] which remains at Versailles.

He received commissions from the comte d'Angiviller, director of the Bâtiments du Roi, on behalf of Louis XVI for figures in a suite of life-size portraits of the great men of France: he realized a Jean de La Fontaine and a Nicolas Poussin, whom he elected to represent in his nightclothes, approximating the draperies of a Roman toga.

Bas-reliefs from the Laiterie, reckoned among his masterpieces, were sold at auction in 1819, but were retrieved by the State in 2005, thanks to a gift from the son of the great dealer-collector Daniel Wildenstein.