MILLET, Aimé
French sculptor. Son of a miniature painter, he studied at the Petite Ecole (Ecole Gratuite de Dessin) and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, where he was a student of David d’Angers. He moved in Romantic circles both during and after his student years and became a close friend of the poet Gérard de Nerval. Belated success came in 1857 when his statue of Ariadne (marble version, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) won a first-class medal at the Salon.
Millet gained a reputation for colossal statuary with his Vercingetorix, erected in 1865 on the site of the Battle of Alesia, Alise-Sainte-Reine, Côte d’Or. Commissioned by Napoleon III, it was executed in beaten copper over an iron frame with technical assistance from Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc, who later designed the structure of the statue of Liberty, New York Harbor. The immense group crowning the Paris Opéra, Apollo between Dance and Music (1869-70), was entrusted to Millet on the strength of his experience in producing Vercingetorix, although it was later decided that the group should be conventionally cast in bronze. Millet also executed several deeply felt tomb effigies, including the retrospective memorial to Alphonse Baudin (bronze, 1872; Paris, Montmartre Cemetery), a Republican representative shot during Napoleon III’s coup in 1851.
