Antoine Coysevox

Charles Antoine Coysevox (29 September 1640 – 10 October 1720), French sculptor, was born at Lyon, and belonged to a family which had emigrated from Franche-Comté, a Spanish possession at the time. The name should be pronounced quazevo.

Coysevox was only seventeen when he produced a statue of the Madonna of considerable merit; and having studied under Louis Lerambert and having further trained himself by taking copies in marble from Roman sculptures (among others from the Venus de Medici and the Castor and Pollux), he was engaged by the bishop of Strasbourg, Cardinal Fürstenberg, to adorn with statuary his château at Saverne (Zabern).

In 1666, he married Marguerite Quillerier, Lerambert's niece, who died a year after the marriage. In 1671, after four years spent working at Saverne, which was subsequently destroyed by fire in 1780, he returned to Paris. In 1676, his bust of the king's painter Charles Le Brun obtained admission for him to the Académie Royale. A year later he married Claude Bourdict.

For niches on the façade of Jules Hardouin-Mansart's royal chapel at Les Invalides, he was commissioned to produce a Charlemagne (illustration) as a pendant to Nicolas Coustou's Louis XI. On the upper storey stand his Cardinal Virtues.

In consequence of the coordination of official arts that was exercised by Charles Le Brun between the years 1677 and 1685, he was employed on behalf of Louis XIV in producing much of the decoration and a large number of statues for Versailles; and he afterwards worked, between 1701 and 1709, with no less facility and success, for the Château de Marly, subsequently largely abandoned, then destroyed in the Revolution.

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