After Christophe- Gabriel Allegrain; 20th century.

After CHRISTOPHE -GABRIEL ALLEGRAIN ; 20th century.
"Venus bathing".
Marble paste.
Measurements: 116,5 x 39 x 51 cm.
Sculpture of round bulk that follows the models of the sculpture entitled the bather that was made by Gabriel Allegrain around 1775, commissioned by the Marquis de Marigny (1727-1781), general director of the Bâtiments du Roi. The piece was first exhibited at the Salon of 1757, where a modeled sketch was shown. When the finished marble was finally exhibited at the 1767 Salon, it received a sensational reception. In 1772, Louis XV gave it to Madame du Barry for her chateau at Louveciennes, where she had recently completed the famous pavilion that introduced the new neoclassicism, generally associated with the "Louis Seize style," into court circles.
Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain was a French sculptor who tempered a neoclassical style with Rococo charm and softness, under the influence of his much more famous brother-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. Allegrain was born into a well-established family of landscape painters in Paris. His most famous work, a marble bather (La Baigneuse), was commissioned for the royal residences through the Bâtiments du Roi in 1755.
After the king's death, Du Barry was so pleased with it that in 1776 she commissioned a hanging bather from Allegrain, which he delivered in 1778. Presented in the landscape garden as Venus and Diane, they provided an allegory of her past sensual love and her present chaste status. (Both are preserved in the Louvre Museum.) There are small-scale patinated bronze reproductions, and both pieces remained popular and often reproduced throughout the 19th century: in 1860, when the Goncourt brothers referred to "the refined legs of a Diane d'Allegrain," their readers evoked the familiar image.His portrait of Joseph Duplessis, 1774, earned the painter a place at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Among his pupils were his son and François-Dominique-Aimé Milhomme. He died in Paris.