Joseph Mezzara

Joseph Ernest Amédée Mezzara (2 March 1820 – 12 July 1901)[1] was a Franco-American sculptor.

Life
Monument to Ary Scheffer (1862), Dordrecht; co-designed with its subject's daughter Cornelia.

Born in New York, his parents Thomas François Gaspard Mezzara (1774-1845) and Marie Angélique Foulon were both painters.[2] The Mezzara family alternated between France and America, but Joseph spent most of his youth in Paris, where he took lessons from the painters Jean-Pierre Granger and Ary Scheffer and the sculptor Pierre-Jean David d'Angers and from 1852 to 1875 exhibited at the Paris Salon. His works included a bust of Alfred de Musset in 1868, now in the foyer of the Comédie-Française.

One of Mezzara's own pupils was Ferdinand Leenhoff, whose sister Mathilde Mezzara married in 1856. This also made him brother-in-law to Suzanne and Édouard Manet.[3] After Scheffer's death in 1858, he and Scheffer's daughter Cornélia Scheffer took over the designing of a monument to Ary in his native Dordrecht from Auguste Bartholdi - this became the Netherlands' first monument to a contemporary artist on its inauguration in 1862 in Mezzara's presence and was listed as a national monument in 2001. Mezzara died in the 6th arrondissement of Paris in 1901.

References
  1. (in French) Archives de Paris, acte de décès n°1255, vue 1 / 9
  2. K. Van der Stighelen, « A Self-Portrait by Francesco Mezzara (1774–1845), the Italian Painter Who Changed New York State Constitutional Law with a Pair of Ass’s Ears », Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, volume 13, No. 2, automne 2014.
  3. (in Dutch) Thera Coppens, Suzanne en Edouard Manet : de liefde van een Hollandse pianiste en een Parijse schilder, Amsterdam, Meulenhoff, 2014, 366 p. (ISBN 978-9-029-08856-5, OCLC 884240705).


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