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November 2014

Vol. 156 / No. 1340

Pope, Roubiliac and the portrait bust

Reviewed by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

New Haven and Waddesdon Manor
by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

Robert Campbell remarks in The London Tradesman (1747) that the ‘Taste of Busts and Figures’ in bronze, plaster and wax ‘prevails much of late Years, and in some measure interferes with Portrait Painting. The Nobility now affect to have their Busts done that Way, rather than sit for their Pictures, and the Fashion is to have their Apartments adorned with Bronzes and Figures in Plaister and Wax’. Campbell ascribes the attraction of sculpture to the fact that, unlike painting, it has ‘no Relation to Colours, nor depends upon Light and Shade, but is sensible Representation of Figures in their real or Projected Dimensions. Painting is only the Object of the Eye, and has no real Existence but in the Light; whereas Sculpture falls under the Cognizance of our Touch as well as Seeing; we can feel it in the dark, and form a Judgement of it though Stone-Blind’.1 The portrait bust also had other allurements: it had a distinguished Antique and Renaissance pedigree, and had the potential to endow its subjects with a degree of immortality.

How and why Alexander Pope (1688–1744) – a poet, and not a nobleman – came to be commemorated so often and by some of the foremost artists of eighteenth-century Britain, and by the French émigré sculptor Louis François Roubiliac in particular, is one of the themes explored in the exhibition Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust, which was first shown at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and then at Waddesdon Manor (closed 26th October). The main thrust of the exhibition was, however, the ‘convergence between authorship, literary fame, and the visual arts, highlighting the complex relationship between Pope’s private persona and public fame’.2 Samuel Johnson remarked that Pope ‘delighted in artifice in his intercourse with mankind, so that he could hardly drink tea without a strategem’ and that he ‘played politician about cabbages and turnips’.3 So determined and so scheming was the poet that through his own efforts he became, in his thirties, the first British poet to make a living from his own writing. Few contemporaries achieved such a degree of universal celebrity, and no English poet had hitherto had his collected works published in his own lifetime.

Pope was of course much more than a poet: he was a critic, a Christian humanist, a sparkling conversationalist and letter writer, an influential garden designer and theorist, and a ­connoisseur of art and architecture. He was, according to Johnson, ‘always ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring’.4 He certainly had a serious and informed interest in portraiture and appears to have contemplated making a living painting faces, an art which he learned from his friend Charles Jervas. It was presumably this interest which in part inspired him – a ‘small, frail, infirm hunchback from a despised [Catholic] minority’ – to channel a great deal of energy into the cultivation of his physical image.5 Pope’s campaign began c.1717 when his friend the poet Matthew Prior commissioned Charles Jervas to paint his likeness – an engraving of which later served as the frontispiece to his Works (1717) – and culminated in his sitting for Roubiliac in c.1738. This terracotta (Fig.54) is unquestionably the most refined and intensely expressive of the artist’s many versions – three of which are posthumous.

Since the 1940s there has been a great deal of interest in Pope’s iconography. Among his first modern champions was the literary theorist William K. Wimsatt at Yale University (a contemporary of Pope’s biographer Maynard Mack), who spent more than twenty years researching the subject, and the fruits of which were published in The Portraits of Alexander Pope (1965). There was also, inspired by his book, an exhibition of ‘the major portraits’ mounted at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 1961, where six of the now eight known Roubiliac busts of the poet were ­displayed together for the first time (Fig.55).

The installations at the two venues of the exhibition under review were reasonably similar in their content. There was, however, at Yale a greater emphasis on Wimsatt’s ­contribution to Pope scholarship, while the Waddesdon show was given a French tweak in acknowledgement of the Manor’s French collections. The latter perspective also served to throw light on Pope’s favourable reception in France, where he was praised by Voltaire for having ‘so becomingly dressed Homer in an English coat’ and described as ‘the best poet of England, and at present of all the world’.6 This French admiration was also underscored by the display of contemporary French translations of the poet’s work, while Jean-Baptiste Pigalle’s bust of Denis Diderot (1777) was included to illustrate how, from the mid-eighteenth ­century, the portrait bust also took hold in France as a means of promoting French authors and men of letters.

The display of the busts was distinctive at both venues: at Yale they were spotlit and arranged in concentric rings, while at Waddesdon they were laid out in an informal grid pattern in a large room suffused with natural light. Although the artificial light was dramatic, the variability and the movement of daylight animated considerably the surface textures and vivacity of the busts in Waddesdon’s White Drawing Room. What modern viewers made of these assemblages is hard to gauge. Many will have been reasonably ­unfamiliar with eighteenth-century portrait busts, or will have given them scant attention in the past, so that to see so many of one ­sitter, in proximity and outside their original settings, must have been an entirely novel sensation. The displays prompted this reviewer to contemplate the facture of the busts and the relationship between them. Who cast and finished the bronzes and the plasters, and where were they made? We know surprisingly little about the technical production and replication of such works of art in this period.

The answers to some of these questions may soon be revealed, as one of the purposes of the exhibition and its catalogue and ­handlist is to launch a projected series of publications, the first of which will reveal the results of new forensic research undertaken on the various busts by the Yale Digital ­Collections Center Imaging Lab in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science. This research has been commissioned with a view to determining a more accurate chronology of the likenesses and to gaining a better understanding of the role of replication and repetition in contemporary sculptural practice. The second spin-off will be Malcolm Baker’s The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-century Britain (Yale University Press, 2015), which will chart the emergence of the independent ­portrait bust and the statue, and their sculptural conventions, meaning and display in Georgian Britain.

The aforementioned efforts will doubtless go some way towards reviving an appreciation of portrait sculpture, and possibly to increase our interest in the production and display of sculpture in general. It will, however, probably be some time before the ­portrait bust receives the acclaim it did in the eighteenth century when it was vaunted by the likes of Samuel Johnson as the ‘best monument which could be raised’ to a person – ­living or dead.7

1    R. Campbell in The London Tradesman (1747), pp.137–39.
2    Catalogue: Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust. By Malcolm Baker. 128 pp. incl. 56 col. ills. (Paul Holberton Publishing, London 2014), £15. ISBN 978–0–9547310–5–2.
3    R.R. Madden: The Infirmities of Genius, London 1833, I, p.135.
4    S. Johnson: Lives of the English Poets, ed. G.B. Hill, Oxford 1905, III, p.217.
5    N.H. Nelson: The Pleasure of Enjoying Poetry: Reading and Enjoying British Poetry from Donne to Burns, Westport and London 2006, p.161.
6    A. Ballantyne: Voltaire’s Visit to England, 1726–1729, London 1893, p.73; and O. Ruffhead: The Life of Alexander Pope Esq. Compiled from Original Manuscripts, London 1769, p.445.
7    Johnson’s Lives of the British Poets completed by William Hazlitt, London 1854, IV, p.279.