LARCHE, Raoul-François

French sculptor. The son of an ornamental sculptor, Larche entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1878. His teachers there were François Jouffroy (1806-1882), Eugène Delaplanche (1836-1891) and Alexandre Falguière. He worked in most branches of sculpture but specialized in that of the ‘art-edition’. The founders Siot-Decauville cast many of his statuettes and objets d’art, such as vases, ashtrays and lamps. His statuette of Loïe Fuller > is the most famous of these editions, and her swirling drapery epitomizes the Art Nouveau style of Larche’s sculpture. The Sèvres factory also reproduced his work in porcelain.

Whether mythological, pastoral or religious, Larche’s subject matter was frequently sentimental. He executed large statues of Joan of Arc (marble; La Madeleine, Paris) and St Anthony (stone; Saint-Antoine-des-Quinze-Vingts, Paris) and undertook a small number of decorative sculptures for Parisian façades, notably for the Grand Palais (1900). His output in all branches of sculpture other than the ‘art-edition’ was modest, though he entered several competitions for monuments, winning the commissions for those to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1909) and Jean-Siméon Chardin (1911) as part of a decorative scheme for the Place du Carrousel in Paris. Larche’s design for a decorative basin, entitled The Seine and its Affluents (plaster version, exhibited Salon 1910), was intended for the same site, but this work (perhaps his most famous) was eventually placed near the Grand Palais after being shown there at the retrospective exhibition of his works in 1920.