Pierre-Jules Cavelier was a French sculptor who rose to prominence by winning the Prix de Rome in 1842 with a plaster statue of Diomedes Entering the Palladium. He was appointed a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he trained many famous students including Hippolyte Lefebvre, Alfred Gilbert and George Grey Barnard. This bust is possibly of his wife or mother, and was sculpted from marble in 1852





