Coustou was a member of a family of famous sculptors; his uncle,
Antoine Coysevox, was a royal sculptor; his elder brother,
Nicolas Coustou was a sculptor, and his son
Guillaume Coustou the Younger also become a noted royal sculptor. Like his older brother, he won the (
Prix de Rome) of the Royal Academy which entitled him to study for four years at the
French Academy in Rome. However, he refused to accept the discipline of the academy, gave up his studies, set out to make his own career as an artist. He worked for a time in the atelier of the painter
Pierre Legros, and eventually returned to Paris. Upon his return to Paris, he assisted his uncle Coysevox in making two monumental equestrian sculptures,
Fame and
Mercury, for the
Château de Marly, the new residence of Louis XIV near the
Palace of Versailles, where he went to escape the crowds and ceremony of the palace. He later (1740–1745), made his own horses, the
Marly Horses, his most famous works, to replace them. The horses reinvent the theme of the colossal Roman marbles of the
Horse Tamers in the Piazza Quirinale, Rome. They were commissioned by Louis XV in 1739 and installed in 1745 at the
Abreuvoir ("Horse Trough") at Marly. The horses were considered masterpieces of the grace and expressiveness of the French Late Baroque or
Rococo style. This oligarchy would persist until the election of Coustou as sole director on 5 February 1735. Coustou also created two colossal monuments,
The Ocean and the
Mediterranean among other sculptures for the park at Marly; the bronze
Rhone, which formed part of the statue of Louis XIV at Lyons, and the sculptures at the entrance of the
Hôtel des Invalides. Of these latter, the
bas-relief representing Louis XIV mounted and accompanied by Justice and Prudence was destroyed during the
Revolution, but was restored in 1815 by
Pierre Cartellier from Coustou's model; the bronze figures of
Mars and
Minerva (1733–34), on either side of the doorway, were not interfered with. In 1714 for Marly he collaborated in two marble sculptures representing
Apollo Chasing Daphne (both at the Louvre), in which Nicolas Coustou sculpted the Apollo and Guillaume the Daphne. About the same time he was commissioned to produce another running figure in marble, a
Hippomenes designed to complement an
Atalanta copied from the Antique by
Pierre Lepautre: each was placed at the center of one of the carp pools at Marly. In 1725, the
Louis Antoine de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Duke of Antin, general director of the
Bâtiments du Roi, commissioned a pair of life-size marbles of
Louis XV as Jupiter and
Marie Leszczyńska as Juno for the park of his
Château de Petit-Bourg, which adjoined the park of Versailles, to which it was added after the Duke's death. A number of his sculptures were for the
Tuileries Gardens, most notably a bronze
Diane à la biche ("Diana and a Deer"), and
Hippoméne (1714), which was originally in the goldfish pond at Marly, then moved to the Tuileries until 1940, when it was brought into the Louvre. Coustou's marble
Bust of Samuel Bernard is at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guillaume often worked with his brother Nicolas Coustou, particularly in the decoration of royal domestic architecture at Versailles. ==Sculpture==