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Augusta Stylianou Gallery 
SculpturesLouis-François Roubiliac (more correctly Roubillac) (1702/1705[1] – 11 January 1762) was a French sculptor who worked in England, one of the four most prominent sculptors in London working in the rococo style,[2] "probably the most accomplished sculptor ever to work in England", according to Margaret Whinney.[3] Dr Richard Bentley (1756), one of Roubiliac's marble busts for Trinity College, Cambridge Works Roubiliac was largely employed for portrait busts, and from the 1740s especially for sepulchral monuments, 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 are the monuments of Handel (1761), Sir Peter Warren, Marshal Wade, the theatrical monument of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale (1761), his most celebrated work, and the Duke of Argyll (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, Sir Isaac Newton, of the Duke of Somerset 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, 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, London, must be attributed to Roubiliac; for him his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a copy of the Chandos Portrait.[4] The statue of Shakespeare (1758), a commission from David Garrick 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; a terracotta model dated 1757 is conserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was also commissioned by Jonathan Tyers to make a sculpture of Handel for his pleasure gardens at Vauxhall. Career Roubiliac was born in Lyon and trained in the studio of Balthasar Permoser in Dresden, where Permoser, a product of Bernini's workshop, was working for the Protestant Elector of Saxony,[5] and later in Paris, in the studio of his fellow-townsman Nicolas Coustou. Disappointed in receiving second place in the competition for the Prix de Rome, 1730,[6] he received his medal but not the chance to study in Rome; he moved to London instead.[7] 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, 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.[8] His first outstanding separate commission was the seated figure of Handel for Vauxhall Gardens,[9] for which he was recommended by Cheere.[10] 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.[11] Handel (Victoria and Albert Museum) Commissions for portrait busts and monuments for country churches[12] supported him until 1745,[13] when he received the first of his commissions for a funeral monument in Westminster Abbey, for the late Duke of Argyll (installed 1749). George Vertue 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"[14] The mourning figure of Eloquence, the notably unkind John Thomas Smith found to be "such a memorial of his powers, that even his friend Pope 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 (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.[15] The neoclassical eye, 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"[16] Part of the memorial (1760) placed by Ann Bellamy Lynn to her husband George at St Mary's church Southwick, Northamptonshire About the mid-century Roubiliac was employed for a time as a modeller at the Chelsea porcelain factory, a new outlet for sculptors' talent in Britain; its entrepreneur Nicholas Sprimont stood godfather to the sculptor's daughter Sophie, in 1744.[17] For a friend like Thomas Hudson 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.[18] For his friend William Hogarth he even carved a portrait of Hogarth's dog "Trump".[19] 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.[20] Soon after his death an auction sale of the contents of his studio was held, 12-15 May 1762, from which Dr Matthew Maty purchased a number of his plaster and terracotta models, which he presented to the newly-founded British Museum. 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.[21] Notes 1. ^ Dates in Margaret Whinney, Sculpture in Britain, 1530 to 1830, 1981:198. 2. ^ The others being Michael Rysbrack, Peter Scheemakers and Henry Cheere. 3. ^ Whinney 1981:198. 4. ^ It was sold in Roubiliac's sale in a lot of eight paintings that brought just ten shillings; it was identified and rescued by the father of John Flaxman, who turned round and sold it is the saleroom for three guineas; the actor Edward Malone subsequently owned it (Smith 1829 vol. II:99). 5. ^ Smith 1829. 6. ^ According to Le Roy de Sainte-Croix, Vie et ouvrages de L. F. Roubiliac, sculpteur lyonnais (1695-1762) Paris, 1882. (An extremely rare work, of which a copy is in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, it otherwise largely follows Smith 1829) The set subject was a bas-relief of Daniel defending Susannah. 7. ^ Gunnis 1968 8. ^ Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, vol. III "Statuaries in the Reign of George II" 9. ^ The terracotta model is conserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum. 10. ^ Smith 1829 vol. II:94; the often-repeated cost of 300 guineas reported by Mrs Esdaile was in fact a published estimate for the sculpture and an elaborate architectural niche, never executed (Whinney 1981:454 note 9). 11. ^ Listed in Smith 1829: vol. II:98. 12. ^ The funeral monument for Bishop Hough, in Worcester Cathedral (1747) was admired in 1753 by Horace Walpole, who found its fully "in the Westminster Abbey style"; "it has a dramatic unity of action unknown in the work of Rysbrack, Scheemakers, or Cheere," Margaret Whinney has observed. (Whinney 1981:203). 13. ^ '1745' is the date on the terracotta model, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 14. ^ Vertue Notebooks, Walpole Society iv:146 quoted by Gunnis 1968. 15. ^ Walpole, Anecdotes. 16. ^ Smith 1829, vol. II;90. 17. ^ Peter Bradshaw, 18th century English porcelain figures, 1745-1795, 1981; many pieces are attributed (see An illustrated catalogue of fifty-eight pieces of fine Chelsea porcelain many modelled by Louis François Roubiliac (circa 1755-1760) in the collection of Henry Edwards Huntington at San Marino, California, 1925) but only Hogarth's pug "Trump" is securely known to be Roubiliac's (J.V.G. Mallet, "Hogarth's pug in porcelain", Victoria & Albert Bulletin (1967:45). 18. ^ Smith 1829, vol II:93; they were bought at Hudson's sale by Joseph Nollekens 19. ^ Gunnis 1968: it was lot 239 in James Brindley's sale at Christie's, 1819. 20. ^ Gunnis 1968; Whinney 1981:. 21. ^ Smith 1829: vol. II:99. Bibliography * Katherine A.M. Esdaile, Roubiliac's Work at Trinity College Cambridge. Cambridge University Press (1924. reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009) ISBN 9781108002318) Allan Cunningham, * The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, vol. 3, pp. 31-67 (London, 1830) the fount of information of later biographies. Dutton Cook, * Art in England ("A Sculptor's Life in the Past Century") (London, 1869); *Austin Dobson, "Little Roubiliac," The Magazine of Art 17 (1894:202, 231); entry in DNB * J.T. Smith, Nollekens and his Times (London, 1829 passim); Smith's father was an assistant in Roubiliac's studio. * Henry B. Wheatley has also devoted research to the work and life of Roubiliac. * Rupert Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660-1851 rev. ed. 1968. * William T. Whitley, Artists and Their Friends in England, 1700-1799, 1928. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/ ", Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ==--==--==
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