There are two plaster casts of this bust in the Musée Girodet
at Montargis. Their inventory numbers (874.226 and 874.227) suggest that they
came to the museum in 1874 as part of the gift to the museum of the studio
contents of Henry de Triqueti, a sculptor whose career in many ways resembles
that of Marochetti, though few contacts between them have been recorded.
Sylvain-Charles Valée (1773-1846), who became Maréchal Valée
in 1837, was born in Brienne-le-Château,
where the young Napoleon Bonaparte received his military training, He joined
the Revolutionary army and, under Napoleon, distinguished himself at the Battle
of Jena. At the Bourbon Restoration, Louis XVIII retained his services as Inspector
General of Artillery. He was put on the non-active list in 1830 and became a
Peer of France in 1835, but returned to active service in Algeria in 1837, and
subsequently became commander of the French expeditionary force. He was given
his marshal's baton after the siege and capture, on 13 October 1837, of the
city of Constantine. Between 1837 and 1840 he was Governor General of Algeria,
where, at the end of his period of office, he was confronted by an insurgency
led by Abdel Kader. Among his various activities in retirement, he served as
president of the committee to centralise subscriptions for Marochetti's equestrian
statue of Ferdinand duc d'Orléans for the Place du Gouvernement in Algiers,
between 1842 and 1844. Following his death on 15 August 1846, Louis Philippe
ordered that Valée's remains should be interred at the Invalides, and that a
statue of him should be placed in the Musée de Versailles. It was to Marochetti
that the commission for this statue was given.
The interest of these two plaster portraits of Maréchal Valée
is that they bear the date 1845, and so were done during the lifetime of the
subject. His having created this image, probably from the life, clearly put Marochetti
in a strong position regarding the commission of the statue.
A biography of Maréchal Valée records that in 1846 a bust of
Valée was made to the headquarters of the French artillery, and was placed in
the reading room of their library. On the 24 August 1846, Lieut -General baron
Gourgaud, president ot he committee of the artillery wrote to thank the Comte
de Salles for the gift of the bust, saying, "The engineers are able to
show with a just pride, in their committee, the image of Maréchal Vauban; now,
thanks to you, monsieur, the artillery will henceforward have the honour also,
of showing off their bust of Maréchal Valée". It remains to be established
whether this was Marochetti's bust or a work by another sculptor.
(see S. Lami, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l'école française
au XIXe siècle, vol.III, Paris, 1919 , p.396, and M. Girod de l'Ain, Grands
artilleurs. Le Maréchal Valée, 1773-1846, Paris and Nancy, 1911, pp.324, 328-9,
and 491)
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