TUAILLON, Louis

German sculptor. It is not known whether his father was his mother’s husband (who was killed in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870), as the personal files of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin state, or, as has been conjectured, the Berlin art dealer Lepke. Tuaillon spent his youth in Berlin, attending the French grammar school until 1879. From 1879 to 1881 he studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, before joining the workshop of the most successful Berlin sculptor of the time, Reinhold Begas, as a pupil. With his neo-Baroque style, Begas set the tone for state art under Emperor William II.

The following year Tuaillon went to Vienna, where he worked for two years in the studio of the sculptor Rudolf Weyr. He then travelled to Rome where, like his teacher Begas, he became a member of the Deutscher Künstlerverein founded in 1846. One of his first important works was Girl Tying a Sandal (1886; Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie), which was already far removed from Begas’s idiom.

From 1906, Tuaillon was once again in Berlin, as Professor in the Academy. His heroic nudes on classical themes may be seen in public parks in Berlin, Bremen, Mecklenburg, Barnim, Bad Freienwalde and at Schloss Merseburg.