Description
Nicolas François Gillet was a sculptor of international stature. On January 6, 1746, he was accepted as a pensioner at the Académie de France in Rome, where he remained until March 20, 1752. On his return to Paris, he was admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture on December 29, 1753, and became an Academician on April 30, 1757, with a marble statue of Le Berger Pâris prêt à donner la pomme qui doit être le prix de la beauté, now in the Musée du Louvre (Inv.MR 1863; N 15457). On November 5, 1757, he received permission to travel to Russia to help establish the Academy of Painting and Sculpture. He lived in Moscow from 1758 to 1759, then moved to St. Petersburg, where he stayed from 1760 to 1778. For twenty years, he fulfilled official commissions from the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna and then Catherine II and trained most of the great Russian sculptors over two generations, including Fedot Shubin and Mikhail Koslovsky. He returned to Paris in 1779, taking the title of Former Director of the Académie de Saint-Pétersbourg.
Received as an Academician at the age of forty-eight, he exhibited two busts, Le portrait de Mademoiselle** and Hébé, at the Salon of 1757. Works by Gillet are sufficiently rare that our bust is may be the one presented by the sculptor under the title Hébé (no. 141). Although dated a few years earlier, the iconography is a perfect match, just as is it is more than likely to be the work depicted on a stand to the sculptor’s left in the fine portrait of him by his compatriot, Nicolas Benjamin Delapierre (1734-1802) (Hermitage Museum). Hebe, goddess of youth and vitality, daughter of Zeus and Hera, protector of young spouses, is the subject of the present sculpture. Her face is graceful, with downcast eyes, her shoulders and torso covered in fine folds of drapery and her hair encircled with roses and foliage. Particularly notable for the virtuosity of his delicate marble sculptures, Nicolas François Gillet here revisits Antiquity with voluptuous suppleness, paving the way for the idealised sculpture of the neo-classical period.
