BIARD, Pierre the Elder

French sculptor, grandson of Colin Biard, and son of Noël Biard. He trained first with his father, a master carpenter, and then in Rome among the followers of Michelangelo. He was, with Mathieu Jacquet, the most important French-born sculptor active in France in the last years of the 16th century, a period dominated by foreign artists. In 1590 he was nominated Surintendant des Bâtiments du Roi, but in 1592 this was rejected by the Cour des Comptes. In 1597 he executed the tomb of Jean-Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, Duc d’Epernon, at Cadillac, Gironde, of which the surviving fragments, such as the head from the reclining effigy of the Duchesse d’Epernon (marble; Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux) and a bronze figure representing Fame (Musée du Louvre, Paris), indicate that he was a robust follower of Giambologna. In 1600 he provided two energetically modelled stone angels (in situ) for the side doors of the rood screen at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, Paris. In 1603, for the Jardin de Diane at Fontainebleau, he decorated with four realistic sitting bronze bloodhounds and four bronze stags’ heads the plinth of a bronze cast (in situ) of the antique statue of Diana the Huntress (Musée du Louvre, Paris).

His son Pierre Biard the Younger was sculptor and printmaker.