working-class
apprenticed to ornamental carver; with Pierre-Jean David d’Angers
1833 – Salon debut with Two Poor Women, Beggary, and Gilbert Dying in the Hospital (all destroyed)
1834 – Pariahs (destroyed) rejected by Salon jury; Tuerie (Slaughter) accepted
1835-48 – due to his Republican political sympathies, Préault’s submissions are rejected by Salon juries (except in 1837 when an earlier work, Head of an Old Man, was accepted)
1849 – wins Salon’s second-class medal, thus exempt from future Salon juries
1853-63 –refuses to participate in the Salon for political reasons
French government
Ophelia, 1842 (Musée d’ Orsay, Paris)
See Nadar’s portrait of Préault
Mower, David. “Antoine Augustin Préault (1809-1879), The Art Bulletin, vol. 63, no. 2 (June 1981): 288-307
Préault, Auguste. Auguste Préault: sculpteur romantique, 1809-1879. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Gallimard, 1997 (in French)
Ribner, Jonathan P. “Henri de Triqueti, Auguste Préault, and the Glorification of Law under the July Monarchy,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 70, no. 3 (September 1988): 486-501
West, Alison. From Pigalle to Preault: Neoclassicism and the Sublime in French Sculpture, 1760-1840. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998