Ambroise Paré (1510–1590) was a pioneering sixteenth-century surgeon famous for advancing battlefield surgery. Here he appears as both a thinker and a man of action, stepping forward as he strokes his beard and reaches for his tools with long, nimble fingers. The sculpture’s dynamism and detailed historical costume is typical of the work of Pierre Jean David d’Angers, who was one of the most celebrated sculptors in France during the first decades of the 1800s. This bronze is a reduced version of an almost eight-foot-tall monument that David produced for the French town of Laval.