Andrea Soldi, Louis François Roubiliac
and Edmé Bouchardon

 

A newly discovered sculptor’s portrait

 

 

 

 

Malcolm Baker

 

 

Images of sculptors, both painted and engraved, offered opportunities for 18th-century artists both in France and England to include within a portrait a further figure, sometimes in a dramatic pose akin to a figure in a history painting. This type of composition, which became increasingly popular in the 18th century, is most familiar from French paintings and engravings that were presented as morceaux de réception but a number of sculptors working in Britain were also represented in this way. Among them are images of Grinling Gibbons by Kneller (Pl 1), Michael Rysbrack by Soldi, and Louis François Roubiliac by Carpentiers. Perhaps the best known of such works are those of Roubiliac by Andrea Soldi, one showing the sculptor with a standing female figure of Charity (Pl 2) and the other showing him with a bust of David Garrick (Pl 3).^[1] To this group may now be added Soldi’s portrait of the sculptor with a male academy figure (Pl 4).

 

 

1 Grinling Gibbons, by John Smith after Sir Godfrey Kneller, c1690. Mezzotint, 34.5 x 26.1 cm. British Museum

 

 

 

2 Louis François Roubiliac by Andrea Soldi, 1751. Oil on canvas. 97.5 x 83 cm.
Dulwich Picture Gallery

 

 

 

3 Louis François Roubiliac by Andrea Soldi, 1757. Oil on canvas. 112.4 x 91.5 cm.
Garrick Club

 

 

 

4 Louis François Roubiliac by Andrea Soldi, 1751–55. Oil on canvas. 77 x 66 cm. Hazlitt

 

 

The newly discovered portrait shows the sculptor turning to his right wearing a dark red unbuttoned tunic, above a white open shirt, and soft cap with a fur lining. His right elbow rests on the top of a modelling stand and in his right hand he holds a modelling tool. The forefinger of his open left hand is placed on the shaped upper level of the modelling stand, with measuring calipers and another modelling tool on the level below. On the modelling stand is placed what appears to be a clay model of a standing male academy figure with arms crossed., from the back of which hangs a cloth, placed on the model to keep the clay moist. X rays reveal an indistinct image of a bust which seems to have been replaced by Soldi with the academy figure.^[2]I t bears no inscription or signature but comparison with Soldi’s other portraits of Roubiliac, especially that in Dulwich, leave little doubt as to its subject and authorship. This painting was acquired at auction in Paris on 9 December 2024 (Hôtel Drouot, Gros & Delletrez, lot 39) and may plausibly be identified with Soldi’s ‘Portrait of Roubiliac the Sculptor’ sold at the sale of the dealer Josiah Taylor (Foster, 25 July, lot 9). ^[3]

The portrait shows the sculptor in the same pose as that in the Dulwich painting, which is signed and dated 1751. Both paintings have Soldi’s characteristic smoothness of execution and his ability to suggest a vivid likeness. The new portrait, with its overall darker tonalities, was presumably executed around the same date as the Dulwich painting (Pl 2) although it is difficult to say which was done first. Both images are unusual in that they represent the sculptor wearing not simply a soft cap but a cap lined with fur. Perhaps this picked up on Hogarth’s 1745 self-portrait in which, as Christine Riding points out, a ‘fur-trimmed cap with gold-thread tassel replaces the soft cap … and this may have been intended by Hogarth as an ‘exotic’ or quirky flourish’.^[4]

But what of the model that is represented here? The way in which the figure is presented here as something on which Roubiliac is actively working might suggest that this is not simply a fictive sculpture placed alongside the sculptor. Given that each of Soldi’s other portraits shows the sculptor working on one of his own models – sculptures that existed rather than an image emblematic of sculpture – it might seem plausible that the painter was here representing the sculptor with his own work on the modelling stand. The Dulwich portrait includes a model relating to the monument to the Duke of Montagu being executed around 1751 while the Garrick Club image (Pl 3) shows the bust of Garrick of around 1757.^[5] However, the figure in the present portrait does not correspond with any sculpture which Roubiliac made in another material and it would seem that this was not a model for a sculpture to be executed on a larger scale. It is also difficult to associated such a model with anything listed in Roubiliac’s posthumous 1762 sale catalogue. ^[6] Four lots (1st day, lot 60; 2nd day, lot 33; 3rd day, lot 63; 4th day, lot 31) refer to anatomy figures though these are all in plaster, while another lot (4th day, lot 69) mentions ‘small designs of figure’ in terracotta.

Although the model may not be linked with a known work by Roubiliac, it can, however, be directly connected with a composition by another celebrated artist, namely Edmé Bouchardon, one of the most influential and refined of 18th-century French sculptors and draughtmen. The figure included here is clearly a reversed version of a red chalk drawing by Bouchardon in the Fogg Art Museum from the 1730s (Pl 5).

 

 

5 Standing male nude with folded arms by Edmé Bouchardon, c1735. Red chalk on paper, 36.3 x 20.4 cm.
Harvard Art Museums, Fogg Museum

 

 

 

6 Standing male nude with folded arms by Pierre Aveline after Edmé Bouchardon, published by Gabriel Huquier, 1738.
Etching, 39.2 x 27.5 cm. British Museum

 

 

But rather than copying the drawing, Soldi appears to have drawn on the etching, with the figure reversed, made by Pierre Aveline (Pl 6).^[7] This was one of a suite of academy figures published in 1738 by Gabriel Huquier: Plate 2 of the Livre de diverses figures d‘académies dessinés d’après le naturel.^[8] No such three-dimensional sculpture is known to have been made by Bouchardon and Aveline’s print is lettered with Bouchardon’s name as the inventor of the composition. Both Roubiliac and Soldi were therefore presumably aware of its authorship. Was the model in Soldi’s portrait a figure made by Roubiliac in imitation of Bouchardon and reproduced here by the painter? In this case, could the terracotta represented here be, as Tessa Murdoch has suggested, an academy figure for use at the St Martin’s Lane Academy?^[9] Could its inclusion in this portrait indeed be connected with the proposed Plan of an Academy proposed in 1755? Although the terracotta differs in its pose from the more dramatic manner of most of Roubiliac’s familiar figures it was presumably considered appropriate as a model for students. In this way, it could represent a mode of sculpture unusual among Roubiliac’s surviving work, perhaps comparable with the terracotta hands in the V&A traditionally associated, albeit uncertainly, with the sculptor.^[10]

This seems unlikely, however, given that the figure is shown from exactly the same angle as the figure in Aveline’s engraving, suggesting that this was Soldi’s source rather than an actual model by Roubiliac. But why did Soldi choose to include this rather than a model by Roubiliac as he did in his other two images of the sculptor? To what extent was Roubiliac involved in the formulation of this image? Perhaps Soldi simply reworked the Dulwich composition and inserted a figure based on Aveline’s print without any involvement by Roubiliac. On the other hand, did Roubiliac himself chose to include Bouchardon’s figure both as an homage to his admired compatriot and as a representation of a sculptural ideal worthy of emulation? But who decided (and why) to paint over the bust that the sculptor was modelling in an earlier stage of this painting? We know nothing of the early histories of any of these three portraits and of the three this new painting is the most puzzling. As yet, these questions may only be answered by the speculations outlined above.

Whatever the explanation for the inclusion within a portrait of Roubiliac of a figure invented by Bouchardon this painting prompts us to think about the relationship between two of the major European sculptors of the 18th century. Although we have no other evidence of a direct connection between them, their respective works and careers have some striking parallels as well as many clear differences. Both the genres of sculpture they worked in – Bouchardon with his fountains, ecclesiastical subjects and equestrian figures and Roubiliac with his busts and monuments – and their sculptural modes – Bouchardon with his severely classical manner and Roubiliac with his animated compositions – differ significantly. But the two equally distinctive sculptors were in accord over their close attention to highly finished surfaces as well as a shared commitment to sculpture’s capacity to aspire to the highest aesthetic ambitions.

 

 

 

 

1. I am grateful to Brian Allen, Richard Goddard, Tessa Murdoch and Stacey Sloboda for helpful discussion about this portrait and the intriguing puzzles it poses.John Ingamells, ‘Andrea Soldi – A Check-list of his Work’, Walpole Society, XLVII (1978–80), 14, nos. 50 and 51. Ingamells (2) rightly states that the Dulwich portrait is ‘a fine piece of characterisation and contrasts convincingly with his Rysbrack (nos. 54–56), so as to suggest the sculptors’ differing attitudes to their craft’ ↑
2. The X-ray was carried out Hazlitt in 2025. Conservation reports from this date make clear that the academy figure was painted at the same time as the rest of the portrait and was not a later addition ↑
3. Lugt, 14070; the oil on canvas portrait measured, 2’ 5” x 2’ 1” (ie 74 x 63.5 cm). These dimensions are closer to those of the present painting (77 x 66 cm) than to those of the portraits at Dulwich (97.5 x 83 cm) or the Garrick Club (112.4 x 91.5 cm). ↑
4. Mark Hallett and Christine. Riding, Hogarth, London 2007, p42, cat. 4) ↑
5. For the Montagu monument and the lost model, see David Bindman and Malcolm Baker, Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument, New Haven and London 1995, pp298–304, and cat. no. L.MOD.8; for the Garrick bust see Malcolm Baker, The Marble Index, New Haven and London 2014, pp328–334. ↑
6. For a transcript of this catalogue see Bindman and Baker, Roubiliac, 1995, Appendix B. ↑
7. For the drawing and the print see Anne-Lise Desmas et al., Bouchardon. Royal Artist of the Enlightenment, exh cat., Los Angeles 2016, pp149–5, cat. nos. 61–62. For Bouchardon’s drawings see Edouard Kopp, The Learned Draughtsman. Edme Bouchardon, Los Angeles 2016. ↑
8. Prints after Bouchardon were presumably available in England and, as Richard Goddard has pointed out to me, they were later reproduced by Charles Grignion. ↑
9. Ilaria Bignamini, ‘George Vertue: Art Historian and Art Institutions in London 1689–1768’, Walpole Society, LIV (1988). ↑
10. Diane Bilbey and Majorie Trusted, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000. A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2002, p125, cat. no. 174. ↑