Sculptor. His full name was Jean-Baptiste (Auguste) Clésinger, he studied under his father, the sculptor Georges-Philippe Clésinger.  Born in Besançon, in the Doubs department of France. Auguste first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1843 with a bust of vicomte Jules de Valdahon and last exhibited there in 1864. In 1847 at the Salon, he created a sensation with his Woman bitten by a serpent, produced from life-casts from his model Apollonie Sabatier (the pose being particularly suitable for such a method), thus reinforcing the scandal with an erotic dimension. Appolonie Sabatier was a salonnière and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire and others. He produced busts of Rachel Félix and of Théophile Gautier, and a statue of Louise of Savoy (now in the Jardin du Luxembourg). He received the knight’s cross of the Légion d’honneur in 1849 and rose to an officer of the order in 1864. In 1847, he married George Sand’s daughter, Solange Dudevant. In 1849, the couple had a daughter, Jeanne, nicknamed Nini, who died in 1855 shortly after her parents’ separation. At the death of the composer-pianist Frédéric Chopin in October, 1849, Auguste made Chopin’s death mask and a cast of his hands. He also sculpted,the white marble funerary monument of Euterpe, the muse of music, for Chopin’s grave at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris in 1850. Auguste died in Paris in January of 1883. (bio by: Shock)