François-Joseph Bosio (1768–1845)

French sculptor born on 19 March 1768 in Monaco; his brother, Jean-Baptiste-François Bosio (1764–1827), was a painter. Bosio is said to have carved in wood from an early age, his figure of Christ attracting the attention of Honoré III, Prince of Monaco, who in 1785 secured for him a position in the Paris studio of Augustin Pajou (1730–1809). An anecdotal account has it that Pajou ejected Bosio after about two years for publicly criticising one of his works. Bosio’s subsequent movements are uncertain, although following the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), records show that he enlisted in the artillery as an officer, resigning his commission in Italy in 1802 and remaining there until 1807. He seems to have practised as a sculptor, although no works are known from this period and the probability is that he earned his living as a praticien. His earliest surviving works suggest that he was a follower of Antonio Canova (1757–1822), but there is no evidence that he met him. What is certain, is that he was on close terms with Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850), whose recommendation to Napoleon’s director-general of museums, Vivant Denon, gave him his breakthrough into official commissions, participating in the modelling of scenes from Napoleon’s Austerlitz campaign (to designs by Pierre-Nolasque Bergeret) to be placed on the Colonne de la Grande Armée in the place Vendôme, Paris (completed 1810). Bosio cemented his professional relationship with Denon with a portrait bust which he exhibited at the Salon of 1810 and which was reproduced in biscuit porcelain at the Sèvres Manufactory. Impressed with Bosio’s skills, Denon introduced him to the Empress Josephine who commissioned a bust of herself and a marble of his Cupid Shooting his Arrows (plaster exh. Salon of 1808; marble, completed 1812, now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg). Bosio went on to produce a portrait statue of the empress, at least one bust of Napoleon himself, and busts and statues of many other Napoleonic figures and dignitaries. In 1809, he married Félicité-Josèphe Pentiaux. Living in turbulent times, Bosio somehow managed to maintain a highly successful practice, smoothly steering his way through successive changes of regime: at the Salon of 1814, he exhibited a bust from the life of Louis XVIII (a bronze cast is at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham) barely seven months after Napoleon’s exile to the island of Elba; during Napoleon’s brief return (‘The Hundred Days’, 20 March–8 July 1815) he successfully applied to be a Chevalier (Knight) of the Légion d’honneur; following Louis XVIII’s restoration, he was elected a member of the Institut de France (1816), appointed a professor of the École des Beaux-Arts (1817), made a Chevalier of the Ordre Royal de St-Michel (1821), and appointed Premier Sculpteur du Roi (1822). Charles X, who acceded to the throne in 1824, promoted Bosio to Officier (Officer) of the Légion d’honneur (1825) and made him a baron (1828). Bosio’s official commissions in these years were plentiful, the most notable, all in Paris, being: the equestrian statue of Louis XIV for Place des Victoires (1816–22); Louis XVI Supported by an Angel, now in the Chapelle expiatoire (1816–25); the flanking allegories of France and Fidelity for the monument to Lamoignon de Malesherbes in the Palais de Justice (1824–26); and the Quadriga Driven by the Personification of the Restoration on the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (inaugurated, 1829). One of his most successful commissions was the figure of Henry IV as a Child (Salon of 1822), of which he made two versions in marble (Versailles; Pau, Musée des Beaux-Arts), one in silver (Louvre), and an edition of 12 in bronze (a half-size cast is in the Royal Collection). In 1830, following the overthrow of Charles X and the ascent of Louise-Philippe in the July Revolution, Bosio, now 62, lost his official position and privileges. Although he turned to painting to supplement his reduced income, exhibiting four canvases at the Salon of 1835, he nevertheless did continue to secure some significant sculptural commissions: a colossal bronze statue of Napoleon for the Colonne de la Grande Armée at Boulogne-sur-Mer (commissioned in 1838); a marble bust and statue of Queen Marie-Amélie, 1841–43 (the original of the bust is in the Louvre, a replica in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the plaster model for the statue is in the Louvre, the marble at Versailles); and a group, History and the Arts consecrating the glories of France, for Versailles (Salon of 1844). His final sculpture at the Salon, in 1845, the year of his death, was Young Indian Woman (Avignon, Musée Calvet); Bosio died in Paris on 28 July.

From May 1963 to October 2025, a bronze cast of one of Bosio’s most striking ideal works, Hercules fighting Achelous transformed into a Serpent, stood in the centre of the Palm House Pond in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in southwest London. The model for this colossal group had been exhibited by Bosio at the Salon of 1814. Designed to be carved in marble, the composition is clearly indebted to, and almost certainly intended to rival, Canova’s Theseus and the Centaur of 1804–19, which Bosio would probably have seen in Rome. The commission for a marble of his Hercules ultimately came in January 1821, from Louis XVIII’s director-general of museums, the comte de Forbin. Remarkably, in April 1822, with carving almost complete, Bosio reported that he had discovered a flaw in the block and requested the sculpture’s recommissioning in bronze. His request approved, the bronze, cast by Auguste-Jean-Marie Carbonneaux, was exhibited at the Salon of 1824 and in 1828 erected in the Tuileries Garden, Paris (relocated to the Louvre in 1992). In 1829, a bronze replica, cast by Charles Crozatier, was purchased by King George IV through his goldsmiths, Rundell, Bridge & Rundell. Initially placed against the north curtain wall of Windsor Castle, in 1909 the group was relocated to the East Terrace Garden as a fountain centrepiece and in 1957, in preparation for the garden’s remodelling, removed with the intention of re-erecting it in Hampton Court Palace’s Privy Garden. But a shortfall in funding necessitated that the group be placed in store. In 1963 it was instead transferred to Kew. By 2011, when the PMSA published its Outer South and West London volume, the siting at Kew was assumed to be permanent. It was, in fact, only there on loan, and in 2024 King Charles made the decision to recall the sculpture so that it could be conserved (by Rupert Harris Conservation) and returned to its former role as the centrepiece of a fountain in Windsor’s East Terrace Garden (now known as the Venus Garden, it is open to the public between July and October). In recognition of the sculpture’s popularity as a part of the Kew landscape, the Royal Collection Trust has made arrangements for a replica to be made for the Palm House Pond.

Bibliography: Benezit Dictionary of Artists Online (2011); Grove Art Online (2003); G. Hubert, ‘François-Joseph Bosio, Sculpteur Monégasque’, Annales Monégasques. Revue d’Histoire de Monaco, no. 9 (1985), pp. 27–76; S. Lami, Dictionnaire des Sculpteurs de l’ École Française au Dix-Neuvième Siecle, vol. 1 (A–C), Paris, 1914, pp. 147–60; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 202, 245–46; J. Marsden, European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty the King (4 vols.), London, 2025, vol. 2, pp. 594–98, nos 322–24; Royal Collection Trust: ‘Hercules and Acheloüs 1824–29’; A. Rusbridger, ‘The Curious Case of the King and the Statue’, Prospect Magazine, 29 October 2025.

Terry Cavanagh, April 2026