Pierre-Jean David d'Angers

David d’Angers was a staunch republican whose political views were deeply imbedded in his art, so his participation in a major public commission from Louis-Philippe’s government in 1832 seems surprising.  This commission involved a series of heroic marble figures for the Tuileries Gardens by leading sculptors of the day.  Fortunately, the Director of Fine Arts at the time, Charles Lenmorant, was an admirer of David d’Angers and carefully selected a subject that he knew would ring true with the sculptor’s political views. This was the patriotic Achaean general, Philopoemen of Megalopolis (253-184BC), known as ‘the last of the Greeks’.  David d’Angers has been free with this interpretation of his subject. The scene is taken from Plutarch’s Lives in which the young hero is wounded at the battle of Sellasia (222 B.C.) but stoically removes a javelin from his leg and proceeds to win the battle. Philopoemen, however, is depicted as a much older man more in keeping with his sobriquet. In evolving the composition David d’Angers took careful account of the specific site and the viewer’s initial impression of the figure rather than conform to the conventional Neo-classical tenets against which he always struggled.

The original marble was transferred to the Louvre in 1859 after a petition to Napoleon III to acquire the first major work by David d’Angers for the national museum. The full size plaster and three variant smaller plasters are in Angers.  The present bronze is an exceptionally large cast by the Thiébaut Frères foundry.