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Aubé, Jean-Paul
(b Longwy, Meurthe et Moselle, 3 July 1837; d Capbreton, Landes, 23 Aug 1916). French sculptor. In 1851 he entered the Ecole Gratuite de Dessin, Paris, also studying with Antoine-Laurent Dantan, and in 1854 moved to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. A grant from his native département enabled him to travel to Italy in 18667, though he was evidently little influenced by antique or Renaissance works of art. Apart from his bronze monument to Dante Alighieri (187980; Paris, Square Monge), his work is in a neo-Rococo style, as exemplified in his terracotta bust of his daughter Marcelle Aubé (1910; Paris, Mus. dOrsay). Besides many portrait busts he also executed public monuments to notable Frenchmen, several of which were destroyed on the orders of the Vichy government in 1941. The most important, and most controversial, was that to Léon Gambetta (bronze, 18848), built in collaboration with the architect Louis-Charles Boileau in the courtyard of the Louvre in Paris; it was damaged during World War II and dismantled from 1954 onwards (model, Paris, Mus. dOrsay). Aubé also supplied decorative sculpture for public buildings as well as private mansions in Paris such as the Hôtel de la Païva on the Champs-Elysées and the Palais Rose (destr. 1969), which belonged to Comte Boni de Castellane.
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