DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68074#0073
MARRIAGE AND FAME 39
the Gardens, and remained one of the permanent attractions of the place.
‘ Handel’s general look says Charles Burney, who well remembered him,
‘ was somewhat heavy and sour; but when he did smile—there was a sudden
flash of intelligence, wit, and good humour, beaming in his countenance, which
I hardly ever saw in any other.’1 It is this tenser and more eager look, at once
inspired and absorbed, which Roubiliac has caught and fixed for ever; in his
other Handel portraits the heaviness, though not oppressive, is there, along
with the intelligence.
Handel was to be represented as Apollo: hence Apollo’s attribute the lyre,
which to us is the weak point in the composition. As an anonymous writer in
the Mirror for zistjune, 182 8, most justly remarks : ‘If the statue should be pre-
served from the ravages of time and accident, the antiquaries will naturally
conclude that the instrument upon which Handel acquired his reputation was
the lyre, though we are at present certain that he never played upon, or even
saw, a lyre, except in wood or stone.’ The lyre in fact is the one conventional
feature of the most original statue of its age; but when this is said, nothing is
left but praise.
Sculpture, in statues at any rate, had been hitherto a full-dress affair, a
matter of periwig and ruffles or of hybrid classical costume; Roubiliac was the
first to represent a great man at his ease. Handel’s work was not done in his
best clothes, and Roubiliac knew it: therefore he represented him in night-cap
and neglige, leaning on bound volumes of his own scores,2 3 and so lost to all
except his art that he has kicked off one slipper and rests his stockinged foot
upon it, in ignorance that his strains are being recorded by the child angel at his
feet in a music-book blank in the marble, with a note or two written down in
the model. The signature, L. F. Roubiliac Inv1 et sculp1, is on the pedestal.
It was precisely this new quality of realism, the fact, as Cunningham said,
that ‘every button seems to have sat for its likeness’, which thrilled the London
public of 1738. We who know Houdon’s Voltaire and Joseph’s Wilberforce can
hardly conceive how violent a departure from custom the Handel was, how
unlike the official sculpture of the day. It is no exaggeration to say that it
marked an era not in English sculpture only, but in European, by introducing
into a full-length figure the domestic character hitherto confined to the bust.
But, successful as it was, de Sainte-Croix greatly exaggerates when he
writes of the sculptors of London as ‘ depasses, eclipses, oublies, dedaignes ’, in
1 An Account of the Musical Performances in West- ORAS; OPERAS; ALEXKS FEAST; a fourth
minster Abbey and the Pantheon, 1785, p. 37. volume is reversed, and the title of a fifth hidden
3 Those whose titles are legible are inscribed by the drapery.
the Gardens, and remained one of the permanent attractions of the place.
‘ Handel’s general look says Charles Burney, who well remembered him,
‘ was somewhat heavy and sour; but when he did smile—there was a sudden
flash of intelligence, wit, and good humour, beaming in his countenance, which
I hardly ever saw in any other.’1 It is this tenser and more eager look, at once
inspired and absorbed, which Roubiliac has caught and fixed for ever; in his
other Handel portraits the heaviness, though not oppressive, is there, along
with the intelligence.
Handel was to be represented as Apollo: hence Apollo’s attribute the lyre,
which to us is the weak point in the composition. As an anonymous writer in
the Mirror for zistjune, 182 8, most justly remarks : ‘If the statue should be pre-
served from the ravages of time and accident, the antiquaries will naturally
conclude that the instrument upon which Handel acquired his reputation was
the lyre, though we are at present certain that he never played upon, or even
saw, a lyre, except in wood or stone.’ The lyre in fact is the one conventional
feature of the most original statue of its age; but when this is said, nothing is
left but praise.
Sculpture, in statues at any rate, had been hitherto a full-dress affair, a
matter of periwig and ruffles or of hybrid classical costume; Roubiliac was the
first to represent a great man at his ease. Handel’s work was not done in his
best clothes, and Roubiliac knew it: therefore he represented him in night-cap
and neglige, leaning on bound volumes of his own scores,2 3 and so lost to all
except his art that he has kicked off one slipper and rests his stockinged foot
upon it, in ignorance that his strains are being recorded by the child angel at his
feet in a music-book blank in the marble, with a note or two written down in
the model. The signature, L. F. Roubiliac Inv1 et sculp1, is on the pedestal.
It was precisely this new quality of realism, the fact, as Cunningham said,
that ‘every button seems to have sat for its likeness’, which thrilled the London
public of 1738. We who know Houdon’s Voltaire and Joseph’s Wilberforce can
hardly conceive how violent a departure from custom the Handel was, how
unlike the official sculpture of the day. It is no exaggeration to say that it
marked an era not in English sculpture only, but in European, by introducing
into a full-length figure the domestic character hitherto confined to the bust.
But, successful as it was, de Sainte-Croix greatly exaggerates when he
writes of the sculptors of London as ‘ depasses, eclipses, oublies, dedaignes ’, in
1 An Account of the Musical Performances in West- ORAS; OPERAS; ALEXKS FEAST; a fourth
minster Abbey and the Pantheon, 1785, p. 37. volume is reversed, and the title of a fifth hidden
3 Those whose titles are legible are inscribed by the drapery.