After this, Julien made his way back to Paris, where he continued working under Coustou. He made a marble copy of the so-called Cleopatra, the Vatican's Sleeping Ariadne, which remains at Versailles.[citation needed] He worked on the sculpture for the mausoleum of Louis, le Grand Dauphin in the cathedral of Sens.[citation needed] Julien failed in 1776 to be admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, having submitted his Ganymede; his resultant dejection and indignance prompted him to consider retiring and living in Rochefort, where workers who could create the prows of ships were needed. In 1779, Julien successfully made his way into the Académie with his Dying Gladiator. When it was exhibited at the Salon of 1779, this work elicited much praise – only sustaining criticism for having overly delicate hands – and it caught the eye of Charles Claude Flahaut, Count of Angiviller.
Julien received commissions from the Count of Angiviller (director of the Bâtiments du Roi) on behalf of Louis XVI for two sculptures in a suite of life-size depictions of great men of France. These sculptures were Jean de La Fontaine, produced 1783–1785, and Nicolas Poussin, produced 1789–1804. The latter sculpture represented Poussin in his nightclothes, which were depicted as similar in appearance to the draperies of a Roman toga. In 1785, the Count of Angiviller commissioned Julien to create the decorative scheme for a dairy at Rambouillet, designed for Marie-Antoinette. The statue Amalthea, which depicted Amalthea, the nurse of Zeus in Greek mythology, was to be the central artistic element of the dairy; in Michael Levey's judgement, this was "probably always the sculptor's most famous work". Julien turns the antique Amalthea into a young woman with full hips, her pose echoing the Venus de' Medici. The other works Julien created for the dairy were two friezes and six medallions, all of which had classical subjects. These bas-reliefs were sold at auction in 1819, but were retrieved by the State in 2005, thanks to a gift from the son of the great dealer-collector Daniel Wildenstein.[citation needed]
↑Modern scholars identify this famous reclining figure as Ariadne Abandoned (Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (Yale University Press, 1981), cat. no. 24, pp 184-87).
Draper, James David, and Guilhem Scherf, Playing with Fire: European Terracotta Models, 1740–1840, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. ISBN1588390993.
Kalnein, Wend Graf, and Michael Levey, Art and Architecture of the Eighteenth Century in France, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1972. ISBN0140560378.
Martin, Meredith, Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherini de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, Harvard University Press, 2011. ISBN9780674048997.
