Lot n° 97
Estimation :
6000 - 8000
EUR
Result without fees
Result
: 7 800EUR
BOIZOT Louis-Simon (1743-1809), entourage de.
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France (1755-1793). Important bust in white marble, resting on a square base, representing the young sovereign wearing a diadem and draped in a cloth, around the age of 30. Wear and tear.
Late 18th century work.
H. : 94 cm - L. : 62 cm.
History : according to our Anglo-Saxon colleagues from whom this bust was acquired by our client in 2001, it could be the copy, until now lost, of the model by Louis-Simon Boizot initially commissioned for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the Count of Vergennes, on June 26, 1781. The original was exhibited at the Salon in 1781 and its model in 1779 at the Salon de la Correspondance. A similar model in plaster is currently exhibited at Versailles under the inventory number MV5917, offered in 1923 by Louis Blériot to the Château de Versailles. This bust was cast from a marble original that Blériot sold to the United States in 1923. The year 1781 was an important one as it gave birth to the Duke of Normandy, Dauphin of France, on October 22. Unfortunately, it was a child of weak constitution, regularly ill, who died in 1789. The importance of the bust was confirmed in 1784 when the Manufacture de Sèvres made a series of biscuit busts accompanied by a bust of King Louis XVI. A pair of these biscuits is exhibited in the collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, see in the work of G. de Bellaigue, published in 1979 on the collections of biscuits of Sèvres of the sovereign. Emile Bourgeois in his book attributes the bust of Marie-Antoinette to an unknown German sculptor named Wengmuller, who would have worked at the Sèvres factory for four years (1786-1789). This same attribution is quoted in the Revue de l'Art ancien et moderne, n°130 of January 10, 1908, on page 39 with a reproduction of the bust in question. See also the review Les Arts, n°160 dated 1917, where our bust is reproduced on the cover and on page 11, with an attribution to Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) and dated 1786. But since then, our model has been attributed to Louis-Simon Boizot by Pierre Ennes, curator at the Louvre. On the other hand, in the catalogue of the exhibition "Marie-Antoinette à Versailles, le goût d'une reine" (Marie-Antoinette at Versailles, the taste of a queen) presented from October 21, 2005 to January 30, 2006, Xavier Salmon writes on page 87, about the draped bust of Marie-Antoinette: "... several hypotheses have been put forward. Those that give to Wengmuller (Bourgeois 1909) or Houdon are today unanimously rejected in favour of an attribution to Boizot. The stylistic characteristics of the portrait seem to support it. It should be noted, however, that in 1996 a terracotta sketch of the draped bust of the sovereign signed by Félix Lecomte and dated 1784 appeared on the art market (London, Daniel Katz Gallery)..." Boizot was a pupil of Michelangelo Slodtz and won the first prize for sculpture in 1762 with The Death of Germanicus. He graduated from the French Academy in Rome and stayed there from 1765 to 1770. He then returned to Paris and remained there until his death in 1809, exhibiting regularly in the Louvre. From 1774 to 1785, he was the director of the Ateliers royaux de la manufacture de Sèvres.
Bibliography: Stanislas Lami, Dictionnaire de sculpteurs de l'École française au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1910. Vol. III, pp. 85-92. Émile Bourgeois, Le biscuit de Sèvres, Paris, 1909. John Hearsey, Marie Antoinette, London, 1972. Simone Hoog, Les sculpteurs, Le Musée, Paris, 1993, p. 263.
Provenance: Our bust comes from the former collection of M. Quintin Craufurd (1743-1819). It was sold in Paris, at Mes Alexandre, Peytouraud and Delaroche, on November 18 and 19, 1820 under the n°416. The description of this bust appears in the catalogue raisonné of the Craufurd collection, published in 1819. The latter maintained intimate relations with the French court and in particular with Queen Marie-Antoinette. He was, with his wife Eleanor Sullivan, one of those who organized the escape to Varennes. In May 1792 he had managed to escape and was living in Brussels, but in the same year he returned to Paris in the hope of rescuing the royal prisoners. He lived among the French émigrés until the Peace of Amiens allowed his return to Paris. Thanks to his influence, Craufurd was able to stay in Paris after the war resumed and died there on November 23, 1819. This bust then passed into the collection of the famous American dealer Cyril Humphris, sold at Sotheby's in New York on 11 January 1995, under No. 71, then in London on 5 July 2000, under No. 125, before being acquired by the current owner on 12 December 2001, at Sotheby's London, under No. 51.
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