Augustin pajou biography examples

The celebrated French sculptor Augustin Pajou was a contemporary of Clodion, Houdon and Pigalle but is today (despite his obvious skill!) not as well known outside of France as he perhaps should be.

Born on 19th September 1730, Pajou grew up in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, then one of the poorer sections of Paris, the son of a minor sculptor, Martin Pajou.

He showed a great deal of promise as a sculptor from a very young age and at age fourteen entered the Paris studio of Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, one of the most prominent decorative and monumental sculptors in France.

At the unprecedented age of eighteen he won the sculpture category of the Prix de Rome, a scholarship prize organised by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture).

Artists who managed to successfully prove their skill won a stay at the Palazzo Mancini in Rome at the expense of the King of France. This period of study in Rome appears to have fostered within Pajou a de