Jean-Marie Bonnassieux

Who was Jean-Marie Bonnassieux?

Jean-Marie Bienaimé Bonnassieux was a French sculptor.

The son of a cabinet maker from Lyon, Bonnassieux showed talent as a boy and was educated at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, under Augustin-Alexandre Dumont. In 1836 he was the co-winner of the Prix de Rome, then completed his education in Rome under the direction of Ingres.

Bonnassieux subsequently taught at the Ecole, and among his students in the 1880s was the young American Lorado Taft, and the British-American sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson. Bonnassieux is set in the context of rigid French academic training in the 19th century in a study of the careers of seventeen winners of the Prix de Rome by A. Le Normand, La Tradition Classique et l'Esprit Romantique: Les sculpteurs de l'académie de France à Rome de 1824 à 1840.

Bonnassieux is buried at Montparnasse Cemetery.