Details of Sculptor

Surname

Roubiliac

Alternative Surname

First Name

Louis François

Initial of Surname

R

Year of Birth/Baptism

1702

Flourished

Year of Death

- 1762

Biographical Details

Recognised by contemporaries as the outstanding sculptor of his age, Roubiliac was a pivotal figure not only in the development of both the monument and the bust but in the emergence in Britain of the sculptor as an independent inventive artist. His achievement was to give sculpture an equality with painting and to produce work that can compare with sculpture made anywhere in Europe during the 18th century. The son of Pierre Roubiliac, merchant, and his wife, Suzanne, he was born on 31 August 1702 in the parish of Saint-Nizier, Lyon, France into a well-established Lyon merchant family with connections with the silk industry. There is no clear evidence that his family was Protestant though Roubiliac was later to have close links with the Huguenot community in London. Roubiliac’s training and early years are poorly documented but the evidence of J T Smith and an independent German source suggest that he went to Dresden around 1718-20, perhaps with the help of a relation who was a financial official at the Saxon court. In Dresden he probably worked for Balthasar Permoser, the sculptor responsible for the rich late baroque sculptural decoration of the Zwinger, Augustus the Strong’s court Festspielplatz (parade-ground). Works such as the Montagu monuments (29, 31) hint at a familiarity with this distinctive northern version of late baroque. More important, however, was the training he received in Paris during the late 1720s when he was a pupil at the Académie Royale, (probably under Guillaume Coustou and Robert le Lorrain), and won the second prize for sculpture in 1730. The usual pattern was for the winner of the second prize to be awarded the first prize in the following year, with a period at the French Academy in Rome. By 1731, however, Roubiliac had for unknown reasons already moved to London. The first record of him in England is the appearance of his name in a list of members of the White Bear masonic lodge in 1730, along with that of the Swiss engineer, Charles Labelye. By this date he seems already to have been associated with Huguenot circles in London and it was in the Huguenot church of St Martin Orgar that on 11 April 1735 that he married Catherine Magdalen Helot (b c 1709; † between 1744 and 1752), who was to bear him a daughter, Sophia.
According to 19th-century accounts, Roubiliac worked first for the sculptors Thomas Carter and Henry Cheere. Following contemporary practices of sub-contracting and collaboration, he may well have continued to work with Cheere at least into the 1740s. Already by the mid 1730s, however, Roubiliac was undertaking individual commissions. One of the earliest of these was probably a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, made for John Conduit (59). According to John Belchier who later bequeathed the terracotta model to the Royal Society, this was ‘made under the Eyes of Mr. Conduit and several of Sir Isaac Newton’s particular friends … and esteemed more like than anything extant of Sir Isaac’ (Royal Society, Minute Book). These connections with those associated with the Royal Society (links made initially through Labelye and his friend John Theophilus Desaguliers) remained important for Roubiliac later in his career, not least in the case of the sculptural portraits commissioned by Robert Smith for Trinity College, Cambridge (86-89, 91, 93, 94, 97-99). By the mid 1730s, however, the sculptor was receiving commissions from patrons in other circles. Among these was the entrepreneur Charles Clay, for whose musical clock (called the Temple of the Monarchies) Roubiliac produced bronze figures of both the four Monarchies and Hercules and Atlas. Another early commission came from John, 2nd Duke of Argyll for whose library at Adderbury he executed busts of Turenne and the Prince Condé (57, 58). These were placed alongside portraits by Michael Rysbrack, the sculptor whom Roubiliac would rival and eventually outshine.
The turning point in Roubiliac’s career came with the commission from Jonathan Tyers for the statue of Handel at Vauxhall Gardens (47). As a full-size statue of a composer, this work was exceptional in representing a living figure who was not a monarch, military leader or at least a nobleman, but it was probably just as striking for contemporary spectators in the casualness of its dress and pose which played upon the impression of the momentary. As well as becoming famous as the ‘logo’ of Tyers’s pleasure gardens, the sculpture was, most unusually, celebrated not only on account of its subject but also for its aesthetic qualities. Praising the ‘finish'd beauties of the sculptor's hand’, one poem dedicated to the patron went so far as to claim that ‘when times remote dwell on Roubillac's name, / They'll still be just to thee who gave him fame.’ By 1740 two distinctive aspects of Roubiliac’s career were already clear: firstly, his association with writers, thinkers and artists and, secondly, the claims he and his work were making for the status of both sculpture and the sculptor.
Roubiliac’s practice during the late 1730s and early 1740s was primarily as a sculptor of busts. Unlike Rysbrack and Peter Scheemakers, his more established rivals, Roubiliac received relatively few portrait commissions from the nobility. His sitters were, above all, writers, professional figures and artists and creative figures, especially those associated with either the St Martin’s Lane Academy or the Italian opera. They included the artists William Hogarth (71), Francis Hayman (?84), Isaac Ware (70) and the musicians Handel (63, 64) and Farinelli (111). To this group also belongs the bust of Alexander Pope, four marble versions of which he produced between 1738 and 1744 (60, 61, 65, 69). Of all the contemporary images of Pope, whether painted or sculpted, these became the most celebrated as well as the most frequently reproduced. Some of these multiple versions in plaster and terracotta were produced by Roubiliac’s own workshop. The sculptor was evidently selling plasters as early as 1740 when the Earl of Marchmont purchased a plaster version of Lord Bolingbroke’s bust (67) and the production of multiples, often of ‘worthies’, formed a distinctive aspect of his sculptural practice which continued throughout his career.
While Roubiliac’s activity as a sculptor of portrait busts took advantage of the growing number of consumers for luxury commodities including sculpture, his busts in marble and terracotta from the late 1730s onwards show him making the bust into a more ambitious and serious genre. Already in the bust of Newton, Roubiliac had created an image which in its subtlety of execution and its quality of surface finish assumed that it would be looked at closely rather than glanced at from a distance. This characteristic feature of his portraits becomes even more marked in the busts produced during the 1740s, such as the marbles of Lord Chesterfield and Martin Folkes (72, 80). In such images Roubiliac took the conventions of sculptural portraiture - whether the classicising bust without drapery or the informal portrait with soft cap - and reworked them in original and striking ways. Frequently, these busts played off the enduring and commemorative function of the marble portrait against the immediate impression of an individual physiognomy. As well as representing contemporaries in this manner, Roubiliac succeeded in giving similar vividness of expression to his historicising portraits, most notably those produced during the 1750s for Trinity College, Cambridge, as part of a sculptural peopling of the college conceived by the master, Robert Smith, who referred to Roubiliac as ‘our sculptor’ (86-89, 91, 93, 94, 97-99). In this remarkable series, the bust format takes on a new grandeur, in part because of the larger scale employed. By the 1750s, however, Roubiliac’s practice was no longer confined to the making of busts as he had become celebrated for monuments in which the conventions of a genre were reconfigured even more dramatically than in the case of the bust.
Roubiliac received his first major monument commission in 1744 when he was asked to design and make the memorial to Bishop Hough in Worcester Cathedral (4). Although this consists of familiar elements (the bishop reclines on a sarcophagus with Religion lifting back drapery from behind to reveal a relief) the monument is already strikingly different from the familiar types used by his principal rivals, Rysbrack and Scheemakers. Before the Hough monument was completed, Roubiliac had already been commissioned (in 1745) to execute the monument in Westminster Abbey to John, 2nd Duke of Argyll, perhaps the most prestigious sculptural commission of the 1740s (11). In this work - ‘opened’ in 1748 and described by Vertue as surpassing ‘for noblenes and skill all those done before, by the best sculptors, this fifty years past’ - the format of a sarcophagus with flanking figures (in this case Eloquence and Minerva) follows a well-established pattern, based ultimately on papal monuments. But the pose of Eloquence, lunging out into the spectator’s space, and the organisation of the figural group above the sarcophagus offer something entirely new, as does the virtuoso carving of all the figures, but most especially Eloquence, as was indeed recognised by Vertue. Most notably, the action of History writing the inscription and the relationship between this figure and the Duke introduce a new narrative drama to the monument. Roubiliac’s subsequent monuments develop this new mode of narrative monument which link figures together in the enactment of a central event, as on that to the Duke of Montagu where the figure of the mourning Duchess observes from below as Charity hangs a medallion of her deceased husband on the ‘Temple of Fame’.
Such elaborate interactions between the protagonists usually means that the figures are not simply placed on an architectural structure but that the figural and architectural elements are fully integrated. Apart from involving complex and ambitious piecing of the component parts in the full-scale marble version, such compositions also required a distinctive design process. Rather than executing initial drawings and executing terracotta models of individual figures late in the development of a composition, as Scheemakers and Rysbrack usually did, Roubiliac seems from the start to have worked in clay and conceived the monument as a whole. Unlike his rivals, he appears not to have offered patrons a range of possibilities from which they might chose but instead seems to have negotiated on the basis of a single proposal which was subsequently developed. Here Roubiliac’s practice corroborates anecdotal evidence that suggests his relationship with patrons differed from that of earlier ‘statuaries’ with theirs. Just as Hogarth was asserting the independent status of the painter, so Roubiliac was making a claim for the sculptor as someone to be valued for his inventiveness as well as for powers of execution.
The complexity and narrative quality of Roubiliac’s relatively early monuments are developed still further in the major monuments created during the later 1750s. But costly undertakings though these were, Roubiliac’s practice during this period also involved the making of a remarkable series of statues, as well as the continuing production of portrait busts. Among the statues, each of which inventively modifies the format of the standing or seated figure, were the unduly neglected image of Sir Thomas Molyneux (21) (yet another subject associated with the Royal Society) and the far better known figures of Lord President Forbes (53), with its dramatic thrusting gesture recalling that of Eloquence on the Argyll monument, and Sir Issac Newton (54). Commissioned by Robert Smith for Trinity, Cambridge, the last was memorably described by Wordsworth as the ‘marble index of a mind for ever/Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone’. Still more famous is the figure of Shakespeare commissioned by David Garrick for the temple in the grounds of his villa at Hampton (55). As well as executing both a bust of Garrick and a bronze relief (100, 130), one of a number of such reliefs executed late in his career - Roubiliac seems have had a particular kinship with Garrick whose acting style employed the same dramatic gestures used by Roubiliac for figures such as Eloquence. The statue for Garrick represents the playwright in the process of composition and evidently inspired in a way that was appropriate and meaningful for both patron and sculptor. It is thus unsurprising that in Carpentier’s portrait of Roubiliac the sculptor is shown at a similar moment of creative frenzy while working on the model for this particular figure.
However original and striking these statues (some of them on monuments) are, Roubiliac’s reputation for subsequent generations rests above all on the series of exceptional monuments without naturalistic depictions of the deceased, executed in the decade or so before his death in 1762. Unlike Rysbrack, Scheemakers and Sir Henry Cheere, Roubiliac and his workshop produced few smaller monuments and only rarely re-used earlier designs for these. Similarly, only a small number of his works were executed for parish churches outside London. Along with the monuments to the Duke and Duchess of Montagu (29, 31), intended for a chancel apparently designed by the sculptor himself, the major exceptions are the monuments to Mary Myddleton at Wrexham (20) and that to Viscount Shannon at Walton-on-Thames (39). As well as prompting one of the earliest extended critical accounts of a work of British sculpture (in the London Magazine) the latter was the subject of a legal dispute between the patron, Shannon’s daughter, the Countess of Middlesex, and the parish, which provides telling evidence about how both sculpture and sculptor were regarded. Still more celebrated, however, are the monuments in Westminster Abbey. Several were designed for the newly developed area above the nave arcade. Following those commemorating Generals Wade and Fleming, Roubiliac exploited the dramatic potential offered by this setting still more effectively in the monument to General Hargrave, completed in 1757 (13, 28, 34). Here the devices of the pyramid collapsing at the end of the time and the emergence of Hargrave from his sarcophagus are used to create a monument which John Wesley considered ‘the most Christian in the Abbey’. The other was the monument to Joseph and Elizabeth Nightingale, completed in 1761 (42), perhaps Roubiliac’s single most celebrated work. With the husband attempting to ward off the skeletal figure of Death emerging from a sarcophagus in the vault below, Roubiliac heightens still further the potential of sculpture to represent dramatic narrative and creates a work that was both deeply imbued with evangelical Christian theology and admired for its inventiveness and virtuosity. The year before the erection of the Nightingale monument. Roubiliac competed unsuccessfully for the Wolfe monument commission (40) and his final monument in the Abbey was that to Handel, whose image had brought him fame almost a quarter of a century earlier (44).
Roubiliac’s very few surviving letters are concerned with business matters and give no hint of his personality but various anecdotes about him suggest that he was a witty and and cultivated person, who had strong opinions which were expressed in an animated way. An alertness of mind as well as engagement with his creative endeavours is certainly indicated by Carpentiers’ portrait of him modeling the statue of Shakespeare. Roubiliac married three times. His first wife was Catherine Magdalen Helot (b c1709) whom he married on 11 April 1735 in the Huguenot church of St Martin Orgar; she died between 1744 and 1752, having borne him a daughter, Sophie, to whom Nicholas Sprimont stood godfather. He then married on 12 January 1752 Elizabeth Crosby, ‘a celebrated Beauty, with a fortune of Ten Thousand Pounds’ (General Advertiser, 11 Jan 1752 ) and on her death in the late 1750s married the printseller, Celeste Regnier. She, their unborn child, together with his two daughters, Sophie and Amelia and his brother Thomas, were the beneficiaries of his will made on 6 January 1762, naming the goldsmith Thomas Harache as his executor. Despite the major monumental commissions received during his last decade, Roubiliac’s financial circumstances were difficult in his late years and he died after along illness on 11 January 1762 leaving debts of ₤80. His assistant, Nicholas Read, made an unsuccessful attempt to continue the business by advertising plaster and terracotta multiples of Roubiliac’s busts of celebrated sitters. In the event, the contents of the studio were sold by Langford in sales on 12 May and 12 June 1762.
Already in his lifetime Roubiliac enjoyed a reputation for his powers of invention which prompted him and Joseph Wilton to be regarded ‘names as high/As Phidias of antiquity’. As a description in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1788 of the unsuccessful model for the Wolfe monument indicates, his terracottas continued to be esteemed while his monuments continued to be highly rated (and described at length) in accounts of Westminster Abbey, such as that in the 1783 edition of James Ralph’s Critical Review of Public Buildings. Similarly his monuments were frequently engraved. Prints of the Hargrave monument, for instance, range from the modest etching in Thomas Johnson’s Summer Productions of 1788 to Philip Dawe’s dramatic mezzotint of 1806. Compositional devices seen in Roubiliac’s monuments were appropriated by sculptors such as John Bacon RA and John Nost III and, according to Cunningham, Chantrey considered the busts at Trinity College, Cambridge, to be of ‘such surpassing beauty’ that ‘no other works … may safely be compared to them’ (Cunningham, III, 1830, 57). By this date, however, Walpole’s criticism of Roubiliac’s monuments for ‘advancing into scenery’ had become amplified in Flaxman’s dislike of their ‘epigrammatic conceits’ and the sculptor’s pictorial and illusionistic effects were seen as increasingly at odds with the taste for neo-classical idealism. With 19th-century attempts to restore the Abbey as a medieval building, Roubiliac’s work at Westminster was less highly regarded, allowing the Warren monument (22) to be partially demolished. The re-appraisal of Roubiliac’s achievement as a sculptor, though already apparent in Dean Stanley’s Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, came with Katherine Arundel Esdaile’s writings about 18th-century monuments and, in particular, her monograph of 1928. More recently, Roubiliac has been recognized as one of the major sculptors of 18th-century Europe and an artist who can stand alongside Hogarth and Reynolds in histories of British art.
Malcolm Baker
Literary References: Vertue III, 84, 85, 143, 127, 146, 152, 154, 161-2; Smith 1828, II, 3, 188, 241, 274; II, 55, 62; Cunningham III, 1829-33, 31-67; Passavant 1836, II, 56, 276; Esdaile, 1928; Anecdotes 1937, 151-2; Whinney 1971, 77-95; Penny 1977 (1), passim; Murdoch 1980, 40-6; Baker 1984 (1), 106-13; Baker 1986 (1); Baker 1995 (1); Baker 1995 (3), 110-37; Bindman and Baker 1995; Grove, vol 27, 242-45 [Murdoch]; Baker 1997, 222-225; Bindman 1997, 22-31; Baker 1998 (1), 41-45; Baker 1998 (2), 498-530; Herding 1998, 268-72; Dawson 1999, passim; Baker 2000, passim; Bilbey 2002, 112-26; ODNB vol 47, 930-33 (Baker); Postle 2004, 55-62; Craske 2007, passim; Wilson 2009 (2), 14-29
Will: repr Esdaile 1928, 168
Auction Catalogues: Roubiliac 1762 (1); Roubiliac 1762 (2)
Portraits of the Sculptor: Andrea Soldi, canvas, 1751, Dulwich Picture Gall, London, (Vertue III, 159); Adriaen Carpentiers, canvas, Louis François Roubiliac modelling his monument to Shakespeare, 1761, YCBA (Bindman and Baker 1995, repr 43); another, NPG, 1762