Cocktails with a Curator: Chinard's “Étienne Vincent de Margnolas” 

In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Assistant Curator Giulio Dalvit discusses the life of sculptor Joseph Chinard, whose terracotta “Portrait of Étienne Vincent de Margnolas” was acquired for the Frick’s collection in 2004 and is now on view on the fourth floor of Frick Madison. Chinard led a very tumultuous early life, jailed for two months in Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo after running afoul of the papacy with his revolutionary ideas and later banished from the Papal States. (Ironically, he was subsequently locked up by the French Jacobins for not being revolutionary enough.) His fortunes turned when he boldly wrote to Napoleon to request that his skills be put to use for the cause, and he eventually became the official portraitist for the emperor and his family. In honor of Chinard’s greatest benefactor, this week’s complementary cocktail is the Napoleon.
To view this sculpture in detail, please visit our website: www.frick.org/chinardbust