Pierre Granier (1655 — 1715) was a proficient but minor French sculptor, trained in the excellent atelier of François Girardon who produced a generation of highly competent sculptors for the Bâtiments du Roi.^[1] Granier served as a modest member of the extensive team that provided sculpture for the Château de Versailles^[2] and its gardens. Strict control over the subjects, scale, materials and to a great extent the design of sculpture for Versailles was exercised by the premier peintre du Roi, Charles Le Brun. According to Antoine-Nicolas Dézallier d'Argenville, Le Brun provided a wax model for Granier's marble group Ino and Melicertes, and a Shepherdess was sculpted after a sketch given by Le Brun.^[3]

Born at Les Matelles near Montpellier, he was an official of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, where he was received in 1686^[4] and to whom he had presented his bust of Louis XIV.^[5]

When the marble sculpture of a god discovered at Smyrna was offered to Louis XIV, Granier was commissioned in 1686 to provide a missing right arm, raised and brandishing a thunderbolt: the result was the so-called Jupiter de Smyrne, now conserved at the Louvre Museum.^[6]

• F. Souchal, French Sculptors of the 17th and 18th Centuries, The reign of Louis XIV, vol. II, Oxford, 1981.