Charles Carpeaux

The son of famous French sculptor and painter Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Charles Carpeaux (25 Apr. 1875, Paris — 28 June 1904, Saigon) went to Angkor for two exploratory missions in 1900 and 1903, before passing away from dysentry and exhaustion.

An artist himself, he entered the Musée du Trocadéro in Paris at a young age, pursuing comparative studies in sculpture and painting, and starting a vast study on his father’s body of work. He also assisted Louis Delaporte at the Musée in cataloguing Khmer sculptures and bas-relief mouldings.

Sent to Indochina to take part to the preliminary inspections of Khmer temples by EFEO, he rapidly became Head of Technical Services of the Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient, while operating as a photographer on digging and restoration sites, in particular for monuments dating back from the Kingdom of Champa.

In addition to his archaelogical and artistic work, he left an instructive Diary-Travelogue, first published in 1908, Les ruines d’Angkor, de Dong-Duong et de Myson.

Charles Carpeaux in Angkor (Photo Musée du Petit Palais, Paris)

Note: In his tender age, Charles often posed — with and without his mother, Amélie Victorine Marie Clotilde de MONTFORT (1847−1908) — for his father, the acclaimed sculptor and Prix de Rome (1854) Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. He is the subject of the ​“Wounded Cupid” sculpture, kept at the Lisbon Gulbenkian Museum (read more here):

Charles Carpeaux as Wounded Cupid, by Jean-Baptise Carpeaux (Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon)