François-Xavier Lalanne (Agen, 1927 — Ury, 2008) studied drawing, painting and sculpture at the Académie Julian from 1946 to 1949. To pay for those studio years he worked as a guard at the Louvre, in the department of Oriental antiquities. His days were spent among winged bulls with human faces and stone guardians half beast, half god: an art in which the animal does not illustrate the world but holds it up. Nothing in the work that followed contradicts that first acquaintance.
