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Thomas, Gabriel-Jules
(b Paris, 10 Sept 1824; d Paris, 8 March 1905). French sculptor. Son of the sculptor Alexis-François Thomas (1795–1875), he was renowned for his precocity in the art. At the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, which he entered in 1841, he was known to fellow students as ‘Coustou’ Thomas, indicating an early preference for an animated Baroque style. One of his masters, Augustin-Alexandre Dumont, successfully harnessed these powers to the classical tradition, and Thomas won the Prix de Rome in 1848. On his return from Rome his unemphatic classicism was demonstrated in the marble statue of Virgil (Paris, Mus. d’Orsay), commissioned in 1859 for the Cour Carrée of the Louvre, Paris, but later acquired for the Musée du Luxembourg. In Thomas’s pair of caryatids representing Drama and Music (bronze and marble, 1866–73) flanking the door to the orchestra stalls of the Paris Opéra, materialistic extravagance is allied to imaginative restraint in a combination typical of much Second Empire decorative sculpture. On occasion, however, Thomas lived up to his student nickname: his statue of Mlle Mars as Celimène (marble; exh. Salon 1865) for the theatre of the Comédie Française, commissioned in 1862 as a pendant to François-Joseph Duret’s Rachel as Phèdre, is a spirited costume piece, while his kneeling portrait for the tomb of Monseigneur Landriot in La Rochelle Cathedral (marble; exh. Salon 1880) recalls the vivid worldliness and stylish drapery of 18th century portraiture.
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