(b Paris, 11 Dec 1811; d Paris, 8 Dec 1890). French sculptor. He was the first of David d’Angers’s pupils and worked during his student years as assistant to Antoine-Louis Barye. After success in the Prix de Rome competition of 1836, he spent four years in Rome where Ingres, then the Director of the Académie de France, was impressed by his envoi of 1842, Hercules Presenting the Hesperidean Apples to Eurystheus (marble; untraced). In Rome, Ottin was converted to FOURIERISM and later sculpted a polemical fireplace with allegorical figures on the theme of harmony and a portrait of Charles Fourier for the Palazzo Sabatier in Florence (exh. Salon 1850; in situ). Ottin’s sculpture exemplifies the eclectic spirit of the mid-19th century. An Indian Hunter Surprised by a Boa Constrictor (exh. Salon 1846; bronze, 1857, Fontainebleau, Château) is an agitated and colourful piece, owing much to his early collaboration with Barye. In the ensuing years his work on public buildings was either classical or Gothic as the occasion demanded. His most ambitious work, the sculptural tableau of Acis and Galatea Surprised by Polyphemus (bronze and marble, 1852–63) for the Medici fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, is a highly theatrical and baroque adaptation of a theme already attempted by James Pradier, while in the Modern Wrestling (bronze, 1864) in Barentin, Seine-Maritime, he modified a realist subject by giving it a classical treatment. His independent character asserted itself at an advanced age, when he took part in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, held in Paris in the former studio of the photographer Nadar. His son, Léon-Auguste Ottin ( fl late 19th C.), was a painter who worked in oils, watercolour and on glass.