Jean Antoine Marie Idrac, “Mercury Inventing the Caduceus”, 1878, Marble, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Jean Antoine Marie Idrac was born in Toulouse, France, in 1849. He studied under painter Albert Guillaume and sculptor Alexandre Falguière at the French Academy in Rome. Idrac won the first Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1873 and exhibited at the Salon from 1877, winning a first class medal in 1879 for his “Mercury Inventing the Caduceus”. He was also made a Knight of the Legion of Honor.

Idrac died at the age of thirty-six before finishing a commissioned equestrian monument on the Quai de Gesvres to honor Etiennne Marcel, the prevost of the merchants of Paris. He was buried in Paris in the Pére-Lachaise Cemetery.