Bust of a young boy, Émile Truffot (1843-1895)

Bust of a young boy
Possibly a posthumous representation of the young imperial prince, son of Emperor Napoleon III
original terracotta
signed E Truffot and dated 1884
height : 44 cms
slight chip to rear base (see photo)

Emile Louis Truffot is the son of Joseph Alphonse Truffot, a locksmith born in Bourges, and Françoise Lamendin, born in Hornaing near Valenciennes. The couple run a hardware store in Valenciennes.
Truffot attended the academies of Valenciennes, then Paris, where the family settled in the early 1860s, the Valenciennes hardware business having gone bankrupt in 1853. He was a pupil of Duret, and later became close to Carpeaux.
In a letter of 1878, he wrote of Carpeaux: "After having been a regular guest in his workshop and his house, I lost sight of him completely at the time of his marriage [...] I remember every moment spent in his company, his imaginative, cookie-cutter corrections. He was a true genius, powerful in all things".
When his brother Georges died in 1861, he made a bust of him for his tomb in Père Lachaise, and married his widow a little later. He was buried in the same tomb.
Truffot did not win the first Grand Prix de Rome, but was about to attempt it again when the age limit for doing so was lowered from 30 to 25... He was too old all of a sudden! By the time the age limit had been reset to 30, the sculptor had married, and would not attempt the competition again.
In 1889, he asked the mayor of Valenciennes to ask the Minister of Fine Arts to allow the plaster cast of his group "Le berger Jupille luttant avec un chien enragé" to be deposited in the museum: the group arrived there 6 months later, but has since disappeared, probably in the fire at the Musée de l'Hôtel de Ville. The group features a shepherd named Jupille who, bitten by a rabid dog, was one of the very first patients cured of rabies by Louis Pasteur in 1885. The bronze statue, however, is kept at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and Jupille himself, now a guard at the Institute, sometimes proudly posed at its feet.
This statue is little-known, yet in the 1960s-70s, everyone had an illustration of it in their hands: it illustrated the 5-franc "Pasteur" banknote, of which over 300 million were printed!
Truffot suffered a stroke on October 20, 1894, and another fatal one on October 20, 1895. He left a widow and a daughter, Marie Louise, daughter of Georges, who also became an artist and, from 1903, a drawing teacher for the city of Paris.
The Musée de Valenciennes holds a terracotta bust of Carpeaux, inscribed "1876/Son élève/E. Truffot". He was also the practitioner who produced the marble busts of Abel and Albert Hamoir by Carpeaux.

The last photo is Truffot's terracotta bust of Carpeaux. Here, you can see Carpeaux's characteristically knotted tie and dress, which is very similar to that of our young boy.

bibliography: les amis du musée de Valenciennes

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