Georges Diebolt

Georges Diebolt, sometimes spelled Diébolt, (6 May 1816, Dijon – 7 November 1861, Paris) was a French sculptor best known for his publicly commissioned monumental works, including the Zouave and Grenadier on the pont de l'Alma in Paris and the Maritime Victory on the Pont des Invalides.

Trained at the École nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he then went to the Villa Medici after winning the Prix de Rome in 1841, towards the end of Louis-Philippe's reign. He came to be valued for works in an academic style which prefigured his 1841 plaster bas-relief La mort de Démosthène (now at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts), or La Villanelle, exhibited at the Salon of 1848 and remarked upon by Théophile Gautier, who described it as

He also produced some more or less romantic paintings, such as Hero and Leander (exhibited in the "grande galerie XIXe siècle" of the musée Roger-Quilliot at Clermont-Ferrand). (See Deluge crdp.ac-clermont.fr)

His short career as a sculptor profited largely from public commissions under the Second French Empire—he was much sought-after for monumental works and received the Légion d'honneur, before dying at only 45.

He treated with equal eclecticism religious subjects such as Saint John the Evangelist (placed on the first story of the tower of Saint-Jacques in Paris during its 1852 restoration) and modern themes, such as the 1854 Maritime Victory on the pont d'Austerlitz.

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