Pierre-Eugène Émile Hébert 

Biography of Pierre-Eugène Émile Hébert  ( 1828-1893 )

Studying with his father, the sculptor Pierre Hébert, and Jean-Jacques Feuchère, Emile Hébert started his artistic career with public comissions, conventional busts and allegories reflecting the eclecticism of his time. He was active from the Second Empire to the beginning of the Third French Republic.

One of the most representative commission was destined to the the Vaudeville Theater in Paris, for which he made two allegorical statues in stone :"Comedy" and "Drama".

Emile Hébert took part in the Salon of French Artists in Paris between 1846 and 1893, exhibiting bronze sculptures. In 1859, he exhibited "And always !! And never !!", that will strongly influenced Baudelaire who was admiring the sculptor’s ability to transcend materiality and to represent emptiness. This sculpture showed a particular side of the artist. Indeed, Hébert had a fascination for morbid subjects, a taste influence by the romantic sculptors.

He also exhibited at the 1855’s Paris’ Universal Exhibition, where he showed a statue "Young girl saving a bee".