Biography

Sculptor, part of the French family of sculptors. The first in a long line of sculptors was Pierre Dumont (d. ?1737), who was a member of the Accademia di S Luca, Rome, and sculptor to Leopold, Duke of Lorraine (reg. 1697-1729)

Augustin-Alexandre Dumont was the great-grandson of François Dumont and son of Jacques-Edme Dumont. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, in 1818, won the Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1823 and spent the next seven years in Italy, producing works such as the Infant Bacchus Nurtured by the Nymph Leucothea (1830; Semur-en-Auxois, Musée Municipal). He returned to France shortly after the July Revolution of 1830; a succession of public commissions followed, including one for the statue of Nicolas Poussin for the Salle Ordinaire des Séances in the Palais de l'Institut de France, Paris (1835; in situ).

The government of the Second Republic commissioned from him a statue of Maréchal Thomas Bugeaud de la Piconnerie (c. 1850; version, Versailles, Château). As well as the various large public sculptures of historical figures that he produced for provincial centres under the Second Empire, he executed a number of portrait sculptures, such as that of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1871; Versailles, Château). Many of the public monuments that Dumont designed were destroyed under the Commune (1871); he was prevented by illness from producing any work after 1875.