Achille-Joseph-Étienne Valois (; 13 January 1785 — 17 December 1862) was a French designer and sculptor who studied for a time in the atelier of Jacques-Louis David and whose sculptural works may be seen in Paris.Émile Bellier de La Chavignerie (ed.), Dictionnaire général des artistes de l'école française, s.v. "Valois, Achille-Joseph-Étienne", includes a longer list of executed commissions. He also studied with Antoine-Denis Chaudet.MacKay, James, The Dictionary of Sculptors in Bronze, Antique Collectors Club, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1977, p. 380
Career Among his early works is the Fontaine de Léda (1806–08) in Fontainebleau style re-sited in the Jardin du Luxembourg. At the restoration of the Bourbons he hastened to execute a bust of Louis XVIII.A bronze cast dated 1814, was sold from the collection of Thierry de Maigret, 10 December 2003, lot 166 (ArtNet). In 1816 he sculpted a portrait of Madame Royale the duchesse d'Angoulême, eldest daughter of the late Louis XVI.Dictionnaire. His bust of the sculptor Antoine-Denis Chaudet, with whom he had also studied, exhibited at the Salon of 1817, was bought in 1820 for the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Angers.Angers 1994, no.28, illustrated. He contributed a marble bas-relief of children representing Medicine intended for a fountain in Place de la Bastille (1817)Dictionnaire général . colossal statues of Louis XVI for MontpellierModels shown in the Salons of 1822 and 1827 (Dictionnaire). and the cast-iron Pêche des coquillages (1838–40) to the central Fontaines de la Concorde, designed by Jacques Ignace Hittorff for Place de la Concorde. Between 1816 and 1827 he produced a statue of Louis XVI, which originally stood in Montpellier before being given as a gift to the city of Louisville, Kentucky in 1966.
As a draughtsman, Valois produced a drawing of the triumphal arrival of celebrated works of art from the Vatican in Paris, 1798,Martin Rosenberg, "Raphael's Transfiguration and Napoleon's Cultural Politics", Eighteenth-Century Studies 19.2 (Winter 1985-1986):180-205) p.193, illus. p. 194. that was copied on a Sèvres porcelain "Etruscan" vase (Vase Étrusque à rouleaux) in 1813.The vase, conserved in the Musée National de Céramique, Sèvres, is illustrated in Lynn Springer Roberts, "The Londonderry Vase: A Royal Gift to Curry Favor", Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 15.1 (1989:68-81+88) p. 81 fig 14.
Valois was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur in 1825.Dictionnaire général .
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