PUGET, PIERRE (1622-1694), French painter, sculptor, architect and engineer, was born at Marseille, on Oct. 31, 1622.
He travelled in Italy as a young man, and was employed by Pietro di Cortona on the ceilings of the Barberini palace. On his return to Marseille in 1643, he painted portraits and carved the colossal figure-heads of men-of-war; he also painted numerous pictures for Aix, Toulon, Cuers and La Ciotat ; his caryatides for the hotel de ville of Toulon were executed between 1655 and 1657. Fouquet employed him to sculpture a "Hercules" for his château in Vaux. In 1655, owing to a serious illness, he was forced to give up painting. In 166o he was in Genoa, where he executed his French Hercules (Louvre) and the statues of St. Sebastian and of Alexandre Sauli in the church of Carignano (c. 1664). In 1669, at the summons of Colbert, he returned to France, and took up his old work in the dockyards of Toulon, until in 1685, disheartened by the destruction by fire of an arsenal he was con structing, he returned to Marseille. Here he continued the series
of sculptures on which he had been employed by Colbert. His statues of Milo (1682), Perseus and Andromeda (1684), and the bas-relief, Alexander and Diogenes (1685) are in the Louvre. In 1688 he visited Paris, but court intrigues obliged him to aban don the project of an equestrian statue of Louis XIV., and he retired to Marseille, where he died on Dec. 2, 1694. His best work, the St. Sebastian at Genoa, shows energy and life. In the museum of Aix in Provence is the bust of a long-haired young man, believed to be Louis XIV., made by Puget in 166o.
See L. Lagrange, Pierre Puget (i868, with a catalogue of works) ; C. Ginoux, Annales de la vie de P. Puget (1894) ; P. Auquier, Pierre Puget . . . biographie critique (1903).