Pair of French Empire sculptures, after Antoine-Denis Chaudet

Two gilt bronze sculptures on oval bases. The bases, standing upon a smooth gilt plinth, are each decorated with a palmette border above which rises a smooth patinated bronze column decorated with fire-gilt bronze appliqués. The column supporting the Venus sculpture is decorated with a winged figure seated upon a cloud, while the Cupid sculpture features a beehive and putti.

Cupid, who has trapped a butterfly by pinching its wings, symbolises the imprisonment of the soul, or the Psyche; the myth of Cupid and Psyche was a well-loved theme during the Neoclassicist period. The Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1752-1822) produced two different interpretations of the love story of Cupid and Psyche. Chaudet based his interpretation of the tale on one of Canova’s statues, which shows the lovers holding a butterfly by the wings, preventing it from flying away. For Chaudet, working with this myth represented an opportunity to express harmony and refined forms in marble. The original marble statue of the kneeling Cupid is part of the Louvre’s collection in Paris.

The figure of the squatting Venus is an interpretation of a Roman marble sculpture based on a lost Greek original. Chaudet further elaborated and adapted this example to the fashion of the Empire period. The small bronze sculptures in question were directly derived from Chaudet’s life-size marble statues.

Antoine-Denis Chaudet (1763-1810)
Antoine-Denis Chaudet was a student of Jean-Baptiste Stouf and Étienne Gois Sr. In 1784, he won the Prix de Rome with a plaster relief. He studied at the Académie de France in Rome, returning to Paris in 1789, where he was admitted by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. He presented a plaster model titled The Child Oedipus Revived by the Shepherd Phorbas and one titled Cupid Catching a Butterfly at the Parisian Salon in 1801 and 1802, respectively.