Emmanuel Frémiet (1824 –1910) was a French sculptor. He is famous for his sculpture of Joan of Arc in Paris (and its “sister” statues in Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon) and the monument to Ferdinand de Lesseps in Suez. The noted sculptor Pierre-Nicolas Tourgueneff was one of many students who learned sculpture under the tutelage of Frémiet.
In 1894, Fremiet was chosen to make the statue to crown the arrow of the abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel.He was then a famous sculptor since the installation of his Joan of Arc place of the Pyramids in Paris in 1874. With her, he founded a new realism showing a willingness to describe until the meticulousness, where the sense of Precision is combined with a true archaeological quest. In the almost Baroque style of Raphael, he prefers the severe iconography of the Middle Ages. Fremiet thus develops a didactic art and avoids the pathos, animated by the double passion of history and science.
It was first in the form of a statuette dedicated to commercial reproduction that he had created his Saint Michel in 1879.
