French sculptor at the crossroads of academic tradition and Art Nouveau, celebrant of the allegorical woman and lush vegetation.

Raoul-François Larche was born on 22 October 1860 in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, in the Gironde. Admitted on 13 August 1877 to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he trained successively under François Jouffroy then Alexandre Falguière until 1888, also benefiting from the teaching of Eugène Delaplanche and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

In 1886, he obtained the second Grand Prix de Rome with Tobias removing the fish from the water. In 1890, a Bust of Corneille destined for the Opéra Garnier constituted his first official commission. In 1893, La Sève and the marble group La Prairie et le Ruisseau earned him a first-class medal at the Salon des Artistes Français. His brother Édouard Larche described La Sève thus: “The branches are the wind flowing along the body, enveloping it with its leaves and buds full of sap, whose gesture, arms raised, seems to accentuate germination.”

From 1888 onwards, his meeting with the founder Siot-Decauville durably oriented his career towards the production of serial decorative arts. His ornamental vocabulary — woman, lush vegetation, youth — thus found exceptional distribution among an international clientele. The Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres commissioned models edited in biscuit, stoneware and Lauth-Vogt paste.

Larche was made Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur on 16 August 1900, then promoted Officier on 16 May 1910. The faces of his figures fall into two series: that of the young Juliette Forbras (for Fleur des Prés, Les Gourmandes, La Foi) and that of Georgette Lecoeur, his wife (for La Sève, Les Roseaux, Les Violettes, Messidor, Bethsabée, La Prairie et le Ruisseau, La Tempête). Raoul Larche died accidentally on 2 June 1912 in Lagny.