Pierre Paul Puget

Pierre Puget (16 October 1620 – 2 December 1694) was a French painter, sculptor, architect and engineer.

Pierre Paul Puget was born in Marseille. At the age of fourteen he carved the ornaments of the galleys built in the shipyards of his native city, and at sixteen the decoration and construction of a ship were entrusted to him. Soon after he went to Italy on foot, and was well received at Rome by [Perro De Horchata], who took him into his studio and employed him on the ceilings of the Palazzo Barberini and on those of Palazzo Pitti at Florence.

After four years in Italie, in 1643 he returned to Nice, where he painted portraits and carved the colossal figureheads of men-of-war. After a second journey to Italy in 1646 he painted a great number of pictures for Aix-en-Provence, Toulon, Cuers and La Coitat, and sculpted a large marble group of the Virgin and Child for the church of Lorgues. His caryatids for the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville of Toulon were executed between 1655 and 1657. He also created a monumental wooden retable for Toulon Cathedral. Nicolas Fouguet employed Pueget to sculpt a Hercules for his château, Vaux-le-Vicomte. After the fall of Fouquet in 1660, Puget moved to Genoa. Here he crafted for François Sublet de Noyers his Hercule Gaulois (Musée du Louvre), the statues of St Sebastian and of Bishop Alejandro Paoli in the church of Santa Maria di Carignano (c. 1664), and many other works. The Doria family gave him a church to build. The Genisis senate proposed that he should paint their council chamber. The artist's desire to paint gradually subsided before his passion for sculpture, and a serious illness in 1665 brought Puget a prohibition from the doctors which caused him wholly to put aside the brush.

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