PRADIER, pra-de-1, James, French sculp tor: b. Geneva, 23 May 1792; d. near Paris, 14 June 1852. In his youth he was apprenticed to a jeweler in his native city where he engraved rings and watch cases. At this work he showed so much ability that he was placed in the Ge neva School of Design. In 1809 he went to Paris where he studied design under Meynier, and sculpture in the studio of Lemot. In 1813 he gained the prize of the Academy for a bas relief of Philoctetes and Ulysses, and this work procured his admission to the French Academy at Rome. Here he studied the antique and re turned to Paris with two statues, one of Bac chante and the other of a son of Niobe, now in the Luxembourg. In 1821 he went again to Rome, where he remained till 1823 and brought back a statue of Psyche, which he had made out of part of the shaft of an ancient marble pillar found at Veii. This work, too, is now in the Luxembourg. From this period he worked constantly at Paris and produced a great num ber of larger and minor sculptures, including a Venus, a group of the Three Graces (now at Versailles), a plaster statue of Jean Jacques Rousseau, after which the casting at Geneva has been made, and Cyparissus with his goat and a huntress. Admitted to the Institute in 1827, he
afterward executed, among other works, a Prometheus, a Faun and Bacchante, a Phidias f now in the Tuileries Gardens), the bas-reliefs on the pediment of the Chamber of Deputies, the allegorical figures of Lille and Strassburg in the Place de la Concorde at Paris, the Industry in front of the exchange, the Flora, which he con sidered one of his most successful works, the 12 colossal Victories on the monument of Napoleon in the Hotel des Invalides, the Ata lanta in the exhibition of 1851 and the Sappho exhibited in 1852. The colossal fountain at Nimes is another example of his work, as is also the monument of the Duc de Berry in the church of Saint Louis at Versailles. The exe cution of his works ranks him a sculptor of the first order, but he is deficient in originality of conception, his monotone borders on insipidity and he sometimes strives to give life to his creations by a touch of meretriciousness.