Louis-François Roubiliac
Encyclopedia
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France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
sculptor
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...
who worked in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, one of the four most prominent sculptors in London working in the rococo
Rococo
Rococo , also referred to as "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful...
style, "probably the most accomplished sculptor ever to work in England", according to Margaret Whinney.
Works
Roubiliac was largely employed for portrait busts, and from the 1740s especially for sepulchral monumentsChurch monument
A church monument is an architectural or sculptural memorial to a dead person or persons, located within a Christian church. It can take various forms, from a simple wall tablet to a large and elaborate structure which may include an effigy of the deceased person and other figures of familial or...
, in essence the two outlets for free-standing sculpture in Britain at the time. Several full-length portrait sculptures are also known. His chief works in Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey
The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, popularly known as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in the City of Westminster, London, United Kingdom, located just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English,...
are the monuments of Handel
HANDEL
HANDEL was the code-name for the UK's National Attack Warning System in the Cold War. It consisted of a small console consisting of two microphones, lights and gauges. The reason behind this was to provide a back-up if anything failed....
(1761), Sir Peter Warren, Marshal Wade
George Wade
Field Marshal George Wade served as a British military commander and Commander-in-Chief of the Forces.-Early career:Wade, born in Kilavally, Westmeath in Ireland, was commissioned into the Earl of Bath's Regiment in 1690 and served in Flanders in 1692, during the Nine Years War, earning a...
, the theatrical monument of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale (1761), his most celebrated work, and the Duke of Argyll
Duke of Argyll
Duke of Argyll is a title, created in the Peerage of Scotland in 1701 and in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in 1892. The Earls, Marquesses, and Dukes of Argyll were for several centuries among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, noble family in Scotland...
(1748), the last of these being the work which first established Roubiliac's fame as a sculptor.
The statues of George I in the Senate House, Cambridge
Senate House (University of Cambridge)
The Senate House of the University of Cambridge is now used mainly for degree ceremonies. It was formerly also used for meetings of the Council of the Senate...
, Sir Isaac Newton, of the Duke of Somerset
Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset
Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset , sometimes referred to as the "Proud Duke". The son of Charles Seymour, 2nd Baron Seymour of Trowbridge, and Elizabeth Alington , he succeeded his brother Francis Seymour, 5th Duke of Somerset, to the dukedom when the latter was shot in 1678...
and of Sir Isaac Newton are all at Cambridge, and of George II erected in Golden Square, London, were also his work. Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
, possesses a series of busts by him of distinguished members of the college.
The celebrated bust of Shakespeare, known as the Davenant bust, in the possession of the Garrick Club
Garrick Club
The Garrick Club is a gentlemen's club in London.-History:The Garrick Club was founded at a meeting in the Committee Room at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on Wednesday 17 August 1831...
, London, must be attributed to Roubiliac; for him his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a copy of the Chandos Portrait
Portraits of Shakespeare
Within four decades of its foundation in 1856, upwards of 60 portraits were offered for sale to the National Portrait Gallery purporting to be of William Shakespeare, but there are only two definitively accepted as portraying him, both of which are posthumous...
. The statue of Shakespeare (1758), a commission from David Garrick
David Garrick
David Garrick was an English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer who influenced nearly all aspects of theatrical practice throughout the 18th century and was a pupil and friend of Dr Samuel Johnson...
to be set up in his garden shrine to Shakespeare at Hampton House, Twickenham, and bequeathed by the actor to the English nation, is in the British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
; a terracotta model dated 1757 is conserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum , set in the Brompton district of The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects...
. He was also commissioned by Jonathan Tyers to make a sculpture of Handel
George Frederick Handel (Roubiliac)
This sculpture of composer George Frideric Handel is by Louis-François Roubiliac . It was commissioned by the impresario Jonathan Tyers for his famous pleasure gardens at Vauxhall. Handel is shown in the guise of Orpheus, holding a lyre...
for his pleasure gardens at Vauxhall.
Career
Roubiliac was born in Lyon and trained in the studio of Balthasar PermoserBalthasar Permoser
Balthasar Permoser was among the leading sculptors of his generation, whose evolving working styles spanned the late Baroque and early Rococo....
in Dresden, where Permoser, a product of Bernini's workshop, was working for the Protestant Elector of Saxony, and later in Paris, in the studio of his fellow-townsman Nicolas Coustou
Nicolas Coustou
Nicolas Coustou was a French sculptor and academic.Born in Lyon, Coustou was the son of a woodcarver, who gave him his first instruction in art. At eighteen he moved to Paris, to study under C.A...
. Disappointed in receiving second place in the competition for the Prix de Rome
Prix de Rome
The Prix de Rome was a scholarship for arts students, principally of painting, sculpture, and architecture. It was created, initially for painters and sculptors, in 1663 in France during the reign of Louis XIV. It was an annual bursary for promising artists having proved their talents by...
, 1730, he received his medal but not the chance to study in Rome; he moved to London instead. In 1735 he was married at St Martin's-in-the-Fields to Caroline Magdalene Hélot, a member of the French Huguenot community in London..
In London, he was employed by "Carter, the statuary" but was introduced by Edward Walpole
Edward Walpole
Sir Edward Walpole KB PC was a British politician, and a younger son of Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister from 1721 to 1742....
, son of the Prime Minister, to Henry Cheere, who took him on as an assistant. Sir Edward's intervention resulted in the commission for half the busts in the series for Trinity College, Dublin, and for the Argyll monument commission, if Horace Walpole is to be credited. His first outstanding separate commission was the seated figure of Handel
George Frederick Handel (Roubiliac)
This sculpture of composer George Frideric Handel is by Louis-François Roubiliac . It was commissioned by the impresario Jonathan Tyers for his famous pleasure gardens at Vauxhall. Handel is shown in the guise of Orpheus, holding a lyre...
for Vauxhall Gardens
Vauxhall Gardens
Vauxhall Gardens was a pleasure garden, one of the leading venues for public entertainment in London, England from the mid 17th century to the mid 19th century. Originally known as New Spring Gardens, the site was believed to have opened before the Restoration of 1660 with the first mention being...
, for which he was recommended by Cheere. Its prominent placement in the fashionable pleasure grounds "fixed Roubiliac's fame" as Walpole asserted, and he was able to open the studio in St Martin's Lane that he maintained until his death. Roubiliac was a founding member of the St Martin's Lane Academy, a professional association and fraternity of rococo artists that was a forerunner to the Royal Academy. His studio in St Martin's Lane became its meeting room; its members came together again for his funeral.
Westminster Abbey
The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, popularly known as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in the City of Westminster, London, United Kingdom, located just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English,...
, for the late Duke of Argyll
John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll
Field Marshal John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll, 1st Duke of Greenwich KG , known as Iain Ruaidh nan Cath or Red John of the Battles, was a Scottish soldier and nobleman.-Early Life:...
(installed 1749). George Vertue
George Vertue
George Vertue was an English engraver and antiquary, whose notebooks on British art of the first half of the 18th century are a valuable source for the period.-Life:...
was one of the work's many admirers; it showed, he thought, "the greatness of his genius in his invention, design and execution, in every part equal, if not superior, to any others" outshining "for nobleness and skill all those before done by the best sculptors this fifty years past" The mourning figure of Eloquence, the notably unkind John Thomas Smith
John Thomas Smith
John Thomas Smith was an Australian politician and seven times Mayor of Melbourne.-Early life:Smith was born at Sydney, the son of John Smith, a Scottish shoemaker, and his wife Elizabeth, née Biggs. He was educated under William Timothy Cape...
found to be "such a memorial of his powers, that even his friend Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
could not have equalled it by an epitaph".
Even when the patrons were prominent, the churches in which the monuments were installed often lay deep in the English countryside: the monument of the Duke of Montagu
John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu
John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu, KG, KB, PC , styled Viscount Monthermer until 1705 and Marquess of Monthermer between 1705 and 1709, was a British peer...
(1752), soon followed by his duchess (1753), are in the church at Warkton, Northamptonshire; Horace Walpole, an inveterate country house visitor, noted them: "well-performed and magnificent, but wanting in simplicity" was his verdict.
The neoclassical eye
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the "classical" art and culture of Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome...
, trained to appreciate svelte line and idealised refinements of nature, did not savour the rude vigour and immediacy of Roubiliac: the legs of the figure of Hercules, supporting the bust of Sir Peter Warren in Roubliac's monument in Westminster Abbey (1753), J.T. Smith found "were copied from a chairman's, and the arms from those of a waterman"
Chelsea porcelain factory
The Chelsea porcelain manufactory is the first important porcelain manufactory in England; its earliest soft-paste porcelain, aimed at the aristocratic market—cream jugs in the form of two seated goats—are dated 1745...
, a new outlet for sculptors' talent in Britain; its entrepreneur Nicholas Sprimont stood godfather to the sculptor's daughter Sophie, in 1744. For a friend like Thomas Hudson
Thomas Hudson (painter)
Thomas Hudson was an English portrait painter in the 18th century. He was born in 1701 in the West Country of the United Kingdom. His exact birthplace is unknown...
he was willing to sculpt figures of Painting and Sculpture to ornament a marble chimneypiece in Hudson's house in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. For his friend William Hogarth
William Hogarth
William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
he even carved a portrait of Hogarth's dog "Trump". His second wife (a considerable heiress) having recently died, he took a brief tour to Italy towards the end of 1752 in the company of several artists.
Soon after his death an auction sale of the contents of his studio was held, 12-15 May 1762, from which Dr Matthew Maty
Matthew Maty
Matthew Maty , originally Matthieu Maty, was a Dutch physician and writer of Huguenot background, and after migration to England secretary of the Royal Society and the second principal librarian of the British Museum.-Early life:...
purchased a number of his plaster and terracotta models, which he presented to the newly-founded British Museum
British Museum
The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...
. Prices were derisory, and when his effects were totalled up, Roubiliac's creditors, J.T. Smith asserted, were satisfied with one shilling sixpence in the pound.