Georges Lucien Guyot

Georges Lucien Guyot was born on 10 December 1885 in Paris, in the working class Bastille quarter. He trained first as a cabinetmaker and wood carver between 1900 and 1903. During his military service with the 39th Infantry Regiment in Rouen, which began in 1904, he was permitted to attend evening classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, an experience that turned him toward sculpture and, in particular, toward the study of animals.

He won a bronze medal at the Salon des Artistes Francais in 1910, and over the following decades built a career centered on bears, big cats, monkeys, and dogs, working in bronze, terracotta, and stone alongside painting, drawing, and engraving. The French state and municipal authorities gave him numerous commissions, including a brown bear for the Vincennes Zoo, horses for the fountain at the Trocadero, and a wild boar at Conches. He was named Chevalier and later, in 1950, Officier of the Legion d'honneur.

In his later years Guyot lived and worked at the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre, in the studio once used by Picasso. His first personal exhibition, whose venue is not documented in available sources, took place around 1970. In 1972 he became the first sculptor to receive the Grand Prix Edouard-Marcel Sandoz. He died in Paris on 31 December 1972, a date given precisely by detailed auction house biographies, though most market databases round his dates to 1885 to 1973.

Guyot was closely associated during his career with the broader animalier tradition that runs from Antoine-Louis Barye through Francois Pompon, and dealer and gallery literature on the artist consistently place him at the front rank of that tradition. Institutional recognition followed a similar arc: acquisitions by the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Petit Palais, and the Palais de la Decouverte, together with public commissions such as the horses for the Trocadero fountain, mark him as a sculptor whose reputation rested as much on public monuments as on gallery exhibitions. Recognition continued to the very end of his life: in 1972 he became the first sculptor to receive the Grand Prix Edouard-Marcel Sandoz.

Guyot's market is a modest, long running secondary market in bronze animalier sculpture rather than a market defined by single blockbuster sales. The most fully documented public sale is Lionne tete levee, sold for EUR 31,250 at Oise Encheres in Chantilly, France, on 14 March 2021. A bronze Panthere with brown patina, cast by Susse Freres, sold for EUR 21,500 at Millon in Paris, though the source does not give an exact sale date. A bronze dog sold at Koller in Zurich for CHF 1,750 including premium, also without a stated date. A separate claim, made by an auction house biography without a stated date, sale location, or lot number, describes a bronze titled Orang Outan selling for EUR 150,000 at an unnamed Paris auction house. That figure is not corroborated by any dated catalog entry available in current research, so it should be treated as unverified rather than as the confirmed record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Guyot and no formal estate authentication program identified in current research, so authenticity rests on the signature, typically rendered as G. Guyot, G.L. Guyot, or Guyot, together with the foundry mark, most often Susse Freres or Alexis Rudier, Fondeur Paris. Documented auction results remain modest and comparatively sparse, and the widely cited very high private-sale figures for the artist have not been corroborated with dated catalog entries, so any single reported price should be checked against a specific auction record rather than taken at face value. Buyers should also note that reference sources disagree on his death year, giving either 1972 or 1973, which can appear inconsistently across gallery and auction listings for the same artist.