Daphné Du Barry: What is beauty?

Materially Speaking

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Celebrated figurative sculptor Daphné Du Barry speaks seven languages and modelled for Salvador Dali in her 20s. She discusses her bronzes, her love of learning and her faith.

Born in Holland, Daphné studied at Munich University and afterwards, at McGill in Canada. Later she enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris to study modern literature. She had a brief career as a chanteuse in Paris and then became an artist.

She studied drawing with the Hungarian master Akos Szabo, then in Florence she learnt from Marcello Tommasi, one of the great masters of classical figurative sculpture.

Daphné met her husband Jean-Claude Du Barry, an art critic, at the home of Salvador Dali in Spain and it was love at first sight. She tells us of his influence on her and how she values observation and continuing to learn all our lives. ‘Sometimes’, she says, ‘we look but we don’t see’.

Her first huge monument was The Baptism of Clovis by St. Remi, in Rheims, France in 1996. It was during the making of this statue of the first catholic king of France that she met Pope John Paul II, which changed her life.

D’Artagnan in Gascony, captain of the musketeers, was created with her husband’s memory in mind, a project he would have loved her to realise.

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