
The NGV is asking for donations to support its acquisition of François Marie Poncet’s 1782 ‘Vénus’. Poncet was a French sculptor who was a pupil of the famous Etienne-Maurice Falconet at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris. He left for Rome in 1760 and spent much of his career in Italy. His first fifteen years in Rome seem to have been spent at the fringes of the Académie de France (he had twice entered the Prix de Rome but been unsuccessful), in contact with British, German and Scandinavian Neo-classical artists. In 1771 he was elected to the Accademia degli Arcadi, and on a journey to Paris in 1775, Poncet stopped in Lyon, where he was received (reçu) as a member of the Lyon academy. At Ferney he made a bust of Voltaire, a striking masterpiece of great realism and vitality. In…