MAILLET, Jacques-Léonard

French sculptor. His themes were of neoclassical and biblical inspiration; his public commissions were in large part for the programs of decorative architectural sculpture required by the grandiose public works programs characteristic of the Second Empire, which included commemorative portraits of French culture heroes. He also provided models for goldsmith's work.

His earliest training had been in a drawing school in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, before he entered the École des Beaux-Arts at the age of seventeen. There he studied with Jean-Jacques Feuchère, winning in 1841 a second prize in the Prix de RomeGLOSSARYA scholarship, founded concurrently with the French Academy in Rome (1666), that enabled prize-winning students at the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris to spend a period (usually 4 years) in Rome at the state's expense. Prizes for architecture began to be awarded regularly in 1723, and prizes for engravers and musicians were added in the 19th century. The prizes were meant to perpetuate the academic tradition and during the 18th and 19th centuries winning the award was the traditional stepping stone to the highest honours for painters and sculptors. Many distinguished artists (as well as many nonentities) were Prix de Rome winners, notably David, Fragonard, and Ingres among painters and Clodion, Girardon, and Houdon among sculptors. The prizes are still awarded and the system has been adopted by other countries.. Then he studied under James Pradier, where he absorbed Pradier's style, combining a neoclassical treatment with sentimental subject matter and a taste for genreGLOSSARYIn a broad sense, the term is used to mean a particular branch or category of art; landscape and portraiture, for example, are genres of painting, and the essay and the short story are genres of literature..

In 1847 he received the premier grand prix de Rome on the given subject, Telemachus bringing back to Phalantes the ashes of Hippias and spent four years as a 'pensionnaire' at the French Academy in Rome, which was the entry to every public career in sculpture in nineteenth-century France.