The Three Graces

What you are looking at

Three nude young women stand side by side on a low marble base, facing the viewer, their bodies touching from shoulder to hip. The central Grace is the pivot of the group. She stands with her weight on one leg, head tilted back and to the side, and lays her right arm loosely over the shoulder of her companion on the left, the hand hanging relaxed. The Grace on the right leans into her, resting her head on the central figure's shoulder with closed eyes, one hand drawn up to her own breast and the other reaching around to rest on her friend's shoulder. The Grace on the left looks down and away, holding a garland of flowers that falls against her thigh.

Behind them, partly hidden, stands a small altar or pedestal hung with carved garlands, and at their feet lies a little casket spilling a string of pearls or flowers, details that tie the group to Venus, whose companions the Graces were. The sculpture stands about 1.72 m high and is carved from white marble.

Pradier pays as much attention to surfaces as to pose. The skin is polished to a soft sheen, while the hair is cut into crisp curls and bound with ribbons, and each face has its own expression: dreamy, sleepy, pensive. Look at the hands, which rest on shoulders and press very slightly into the flesh, a small illusion of softness in stone that viewers often miss on a first look. Notice too how the three bodies are almost identical in proportion but differ in their turn and lean, so that the group sways gently from left to right like a single figure seen three times.

Who were the Three Graces?

In Greek myth the Charites, known in Latin as the Gratiae, were daughters of Zeus and companions of Aphrodite. Hesiod names them Aglaia (splendor), Euphrosyne (mirth) and Thalia (good cheer). From antiquity onward they stood for beauty, charm and the giving and receiving of favors, which is why they were often shown with linked arms in a circle: a gift passes from one to the next and returns. Renaissance painters such as Raphael and Botticelli revived the subject, and by the early nineteenth century it was one of the standard tests of a sculptor's skill with the female nude.

How Pradier made it

Pradier's group sits in the shadow of the most famous modern version, The Three Graces by Antonio Canova (1814–17). The classical formula, known from Roman wall paintings and the ancient marble group in Siena, shows the central Grace from behind between two seen from the front. Canova broke with it by turning all three toward one another, and Pradier, like Canova, turns all three the same way, here frankly toward the viewer. What he changes is the temperature. Canova's Graces are cool and idealized; Pradier's are fuller, more individual and more openly sensual, and their faces look less like antique types than like portraits of the models who posed in his studio.

Born in Geneva in 1790 and trained in Paris, Pradier won the Prix de Rome in 1813 and spent five years at the French Academy in Rome studying ancient sculpture. By 1831 he was a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts and one of the most successful sculptors in France. His studio worked on a near-industrial scale, and the Three Graces were later reproduced in reductions of marble, bronze and plaster, a common practice that spread a popular design to private homes.

History and royal purchase

The marble was exhibited at the Salon of 1831, the first Salon after the July Revolution of 1830 brought Louis-Philippe to the throne. It was bought for the crown by the minister of the Maison du Roi in September 1831 and placed in the royal collections at Versailles, where it remained until it entered the Louvre in 1928. The purchase fitted the new regime's taste for safe, graceful mythological subjects alongside the history paintings it commissioned for Versailles.

Meaning and reception

Read through the classical tradition, the group is an allegory of friendship and generosity. Read in its own time, it was also a fashionable display of the female body sanctioned by myth. Pradier's critics, then and since, have accused him of making antiquity an excuse for erotic charm; his admirers, including Gustave Flaubert, who was a regular in his studio, valued exactly that warmth. Both views are fair. The Graces mark the point where French Neoclassicism started to soften into the polished sensuality of later Second Empire sculpture, the line that runs on to Bouguereau's Birth of Venus.

Pradier's reputation fell sharply in the twentieth century, when polished academic marble went out of favor, and has recovered since the 1980s as museums have looked again at nineteenth-century sculpture. Today the group is valued both for its craft and as a document of how Romantic-era Paris imagined antiquity.

Where to see it

The Three Graces are in the Musée du Louvre, Paris,, in the department of sculptures; check the museum's online collection for its current room before a visit. For other treatments of classical myth in marble, see Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, famous sculptures and Greek statues.