Achille Valois

Who was Achille Valois?

Achille-Joseph-Étienne Valois was a French designer and sculptor who studied for a time in the atelier of Jacques-Louis David and whose sculptural works may be seen in Paris. Among his early works is the Fontaine de Léda in Fontainebleau style re-sited in the Jardin du Luxembourg. At the restoration of the Bourbons he hastened to execute a bust of Louis XVIII. In 1816 he sculpted a portrait of Madame Royale the duchesse d'Angoulême, eldest daughter of the late Louis XVI. His bust of the sculptor Antoine-Denis Chaudet, with whom he had also studied, exhibited at the Salon of 1817, was bought in 1820 for the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers. He contributed a marble bas-relief of children representing Medicine intended for a fountain in Place de la Bastille colossal statues of Louis XVI for Montpellier and the cast-iron Pêche des coquillages to the central Fontaines de la Concorde, designed by Jacques Ignace Hittorff for Place de la Concorde.

As a draughtsman, Valois produced a drawing of the triumphal arrival of celebrated works of art from the Vatican in Paris, 1798, that was copied on a Sèvres porcelain "Etruscan" vase in 1813.