Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain
Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain (11 October 1710, Paris – 1795)
was a French sculptor who tempered a neoclassical style with
Rococo charm and softness, under the influence of his much
more famous brother-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle.
Allegrain was born into a
well-established family of landscape painters in Paris.
His single most famous
work, a marble Bather (La Baigneuse), was commissioned for
the royal residences through the Bâtiments du Roi in 1755; a
modelled sketch was shown at the Salon of 1757. When the
finished marble was finally exhibited at the Salon of 1767
it received a sensational reception. In 1772 Louis XV
presented it to Mme du Barry for her Château de Louveciennes,
where she had recently completed the famed pavilion that
introduced the new Neoclassicism, usually associated with
the "Louis Seize style", into court circles. After the
King's death she was pleased enough with it to commission
from Allegrain a pendant bather in 1776, which he delivered
in 1778 (illustration). presented in the landscape garden as
Vénus and Diane they provided an allegory of her past
sensual love and her present chaste condition. (Both are
conserved in the Louvre Museum.) There are small-scale
patinated bronze reproductions, and both pieces remained
popular and often reproduced through the nineteenth century:
in 1860, when the Goncourt brothers referred to "the refined
legs of a Diana of Allegrain",[1] their readers conjured up
the familiar image.
His portrait by Joseph
Duplessis, 1774, earned the painter a place in the Académie
Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Among his pupils were
his son and François-Dominique-Aimé Milhomme. He died in
Paris.
