(b Paris, 1769; d Paris, July 1825). French sculptor and painter. He studied sculpture with his father, Claude Gautherot (1729–1802); throughout his life he was known as both Pierre and Claude, signing his work with his surname only. He initially specialized in portrait busts of well-known figures such as Voltaire, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and Jean-Sylvain Bailly (all untraced). In 1787 he entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David and became his close friend. Thereafter he devoted himself completely to painting, initially choosing his subjects from his sculptural practice, as in his copies of portraits of Voltaire (after Nicolas de Largillierre) and Turgot (after Joseph Ducreux) (both 1790; St Petersburg, Hermitage). Delécluze’s description of Gautherot in David’s studio in 1796 and 1797 mentions that he was an avid Republican and that he wore a blond, powdered wig to disguise a skin disease. At the Salon of 1799 he exhibited Pyramus and Thisbe (Melun, Mus. Melun) and a year later another version of that subject (Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Mus. A.). At the Salon of 1802 he treated the fashionable subject of the Funeral Procession of Atala (untraced; see Lemonnier, p. 366), taken from the sensationally successful novel by François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand. In a scene full of pathos, the mournful cortège has Père Aubry with head bowed, followed by the Indian Chactas carrying the lifeless Atala.