This is a bronze medal made by Jules-Clément Chaplain in France, 1872. The medal was made to commemorate the building of the Church of St. Ambroise at Paris, inaugurated in 1869. The obverse of this medal represents the front view of the Church of St. Ambroise, and the reverse shows the arts of the City of Paris.
Chaplain (1839-1909) was a french medallist and sculptor. He entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1857, where he studied sculpture under François Jouffroy and medals under Eugène Oudiné.
In 1863 he won the Prix de Rome for medal-engraving and worked in Rome from 1864 to 1868. He exhibited regularly at the Salon from 1863, receiving numerous awards. As the leading French medallist he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1881. He had been profoundly important in transforming the public's perception of medallic art.
Chaplain changed public taste by moving away from the established tradition by which medallic portraits and reverse compositions emerged from a completely flat field bounded by a raised circular rim. He incorporated the field into the composition, using it not as a neutral background but as the pictorial space in which the event or portrait sitter was situated.