Henry Peacham was informed that Le Sueur was a pupil of
Giambologna in Florence. Though he is not otherwise documented in Florence, in Paris he was recorded as
sculpteur du Roy at the baptism of his son at
Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois in 1610, when a royal secretary and the daughter of another served as witnesses. In London he and his second wife were of the
Huguenot congregation in
Threadneedle Street. He worked with
Pietro Tacca's assistants on the equestrian bronze of Henry IV on the
Pont Neuf, a project that gave him technical skills that were put to use in his equestrian Charles I. Since
Inigo Jones had passed through Paris in July 1613, in the train of Lord Arundel, on their way to Strasbourg, Katharine Esdaile suggested that Jones was the one who convinced Le Sueur to go to England. The earliest occasion on which Le Sueur received an official commission in England was for twelve figures against the
frieze of the grand
catafalque— both figures and hearse designed by Inigo Jones — for
James I's funeral in 1625. In 1628, Le Sueur provided armour for
Jeffrey Hudson, a court dwarf serving
Henrietta Maria. In the 1630s, he worked in "brass and marble" for a fountain in the Queen's garden at
Somerset House. In 1631 he was dispatched to Rome to arrange to have moulds taken of classical antiquities, to complement the
Borghese Gladiator, moulds of which had been obtained for Charles, and which Le Sueur cast in London for the
Privy Garden of the Palace of Whitehall. Henry Peacham praised Le Sueur for his skill and credits the Catholic priest and agent, George Gage, with obtaining the relevant casts in Rome: "The best of them is the Gladiator, molded from that in
Cardinall Borgheses Villa, by the procurement and industry of ingenious Master
Gage." On a recommendation of Sir
Balthazar Gerbier, he cast the famous bronze
equestrian statue of the King, made in 1633 for
Richard, Lord Weston, Lord High Treasurer, for his house Mortlake Park in Roehampton. This statue was ordered to be destroyed by
Parliament in 1649. After being hidden by the man charged with destroying the statue, it resurfaced at
the Restoration and was erected in 1675 at the original site of
Charing Cross, at
Trafalgar Square, London (on a small traffic island at the entrance to
The Mall). In 1634 he made for the King a cast of the
Diane Chasseresse then still at Fontainebleau. Le Sueur created a market for the
portrait bust, initiated and epitomized by a series of
bronze busts and one
marble bust of Charles I (1631), now at the
Victoria and Albert Museum, the only work in marble by Le Sueur known to exist. A bust of Katherine, Lady Dysart, was formerly at
Ham House. There are bronze sculptures by Le Sueur for tombs in
Westminster Abbey, of the Stuart Kings Charles I and James I originally in niches on the former screen by Inigo Jones in
Winchester Cathedral and now re-located at the west end of the Cathedral in which Le Sueur also provided the bronze reclining figure for the tomb of
Lord Portland. At
Oxford are his lifesize bronze standing figures of King Charles and Queen
Henrietta Maria, made for
Archbishop Laud, 1634, now at
St John's College, and of
William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580–1630), originally standing in the forecourt at
Wilton House and in 1723 donated by the 8th Earl to the
Bodleian Library, Oxford, where it now stands outdoors in front of the main entrance. With the beginnings of the
English Civil War, English court patronage dried up, and Le Sueur returned to Paris in 1643, produced four busts of
Richelieu for the
Duchess of Aiguillon, and disappeared from art history. Le Sueur is last recorded as being alive in 1658, although this is not definitively his date of death; in 1668 his wife was recorded as being a widow and thus the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography records Le Sueur's date of death as being between 1658 and 1668. His known pupils were both of Huguenot extraction as was Le Sueur himself: one was Peter Besnier (or Bennier), appointed sculptor to the king after Le Sueur's departure; another was John Poultrain or Colt. ==Selected works==