François-Raoul Larche 1860-1912 Tempete et ses nuées

Larche had his sculptural training under Jouffroy and Falguière at the École des Beaux arts. He won the second prize Grand Prix de Rome in 1886, having made his debut at the Salon two years earlier. He was awarded many honors over the following thirty years and received an impressive crop of state and public commissions during his fairly brief career. His work was acclaimed at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle and was awarded the gold medal for sculpture.

In 1896, Larche executed a plaster model of La Tempête et Ses Nuées with a height of nearly three and a half metres and now in the permanent collection of the Petit Palais in Paris. Here Larche allegorically portrays the wrath and violence of a storm by rendering a dynamic composition of intertwining figures and clouds rising above waves of water. The bronze group was first exhibited at the 1899 Salon and a year later at the Exposition Universelle.