# DURET, Francisque-Joseph [View the canonical artist record]() ## Artist - Lifespan: 1804–1865 - Profession: sculptor - School: French ## Biography French sculptor. Son of a sculptor of the same name \(1729-1816\) and a pupil of François-Joseph Bosio, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1818 and won the Prix de Rome in 1823. Among his works executed at the Académie de France in Rome is Orestes Mad \(marble, c. 1825; Avignon, Musée Calvet\), a colossal head modelled after the Antique that is at the same time a self-portrait, and Mercury Inventing the Lyre \(marble; destroyed\), an elegant statue much praised at the 1831 Salon. Journeys from Rome to Naples resulted in Neapolitan Fisherboy Dancing the Tarantella \(bronze, exhibited Salon 1833; Paris, Louvre\), which was executed on his return to Paris and was one of the earliest Neapolitan genre subjects in French 19th-century art. In this work Duret reconciled classical form with modern subject-matter and the freedom of modelling allowed by working in bronze. Its popularity led to reduced-scale bronze editions by the founder P.-M. Delafontaine, who also reproduced in this fashion Duret's Grape-picker Extemporizing \(bronze, 1839; Paris, Louvre\). ## Related artworks - [Chactas Meditating on Atala's Tomb]() - [Grape-picker Extemporizing]() - [Neapolitan Fisherman Dancing the Tarantella]() - [Victory]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()