DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68074#0137
ROUBILIAC AND THE CHELSEA FACTORY 79
may suffer from the process of glazing—and that they did suffer at Chelsea
the recently discovered moulds and the casts taken from those moulds
conclusively prove—yet the underlying style and conception must corre-
spond. The master of broad lines and sweeping draperies—the artist who
disliked the wigs of his own day and where possible represented his sitters
bare-headed—who modelled his work with the minutest care without ever
losing sight of the breadth of treatment at which he aimed, cannot, in his
Chelsea figures and in them alone, have been false to his own style, which
we can follow in detail from 1727 till his death in 1762. His ingenuity was
intellectual, not mechanical; thought, over-elaborate at times but always
there, lies at the back of his most extravagant allegories; and thought is the
quality most lacking in the Chelsea pieces commonly attributed to him.
These works, known as the R pieces from the initial usually impressed
upon their base, are marked by a dazzling mechanical dexterity, and most,
if not all, are based on existing subjects, Dresden figures, engravings after
Watteau and Boucher, and the like. Their identification rests on the following
reasoning:
Roubiliac worked for the Chelsea Factory; Roubiliac was famous; the most
famous of Chelsea pieces, homogeneous in style, are marked with an R; there-
fore these pieces are the work of Roubiliac. The argument appears to have
been simultaneously started by Sir A. H. Church and the Schreiber Catalogue
in 1885, and has no weight of tradition behind it; deeply rooted as the belief
in its truth now is, we have to consider whether it is well founded.
In the first place, almost all of these R pieces are copies, and it is in the
highest degree improbable that a sculptor of such restless and conscious
originality, to the point of signing even his portraits invenit et fecit, should have
had anything to do with them. In the second, the subjects represented are
alien to his work elsewhere. Tight waists and hoop petticoats, coquettish
gestures and Arcadian sentiment, cocked hats and flowery boskage, simply do
not occur either in the long list of his existing works or in that yet longer Cata-
logue which included the very sweepings of his studio. We see there that he
possessed a very large number of plaster casts of his own work of all periods as
well as a number of terra-cotta models, as many as five for that of the Duchess of
Montagu, and no fewer than six and a mould for the trivial commission for
Hudson’s mantelpiece; and the number of moulds is a feature in the Catalogue
unparalleled in the sculptors’ catalogues of the period. We are therefore justi-
fied in saying that Roubiliac took unusual care in the preparation and preser-
vation of his work, and would be likely to have kept some record of his Chelsea
may suffer from the process of glazing—and that they did suffer at Chelsea
the recently discovered moulds and the casts taken from those moulds
conclusively prove—yet the underlying style and conception must corre-
spond. The master of broad lines and sweeping draperies—the artist who
disliked the wigs of his own day and where possible represented his sitters
bare-headed—who modelled his work with the minutest care without ever
losing sight of the breadth of treatment at which he aimed, cannot, in his
Chelsea figures and in them alone, have been false to his own style, which
we can follow in detail from 1727 till his death in 1762. His ingenuity was
intellectual, not mechanical; thought, over-elaborate at times but always
there, lies at the back of his most extravagant allegories; and thought is the
quality most lacking in the Chelsea pieces commonly attributed to him.
These works, known as the R pieces from the initial usually impressed
upon their base, are marked by a dazzling mechanical dexterity, and most,
if not all, are based on existing subjects, Dresden figures, engravings after
Watteau and Boucher, and the like. Their identification rests on the following
reasoning:
Roubiliac worked for the Chelsea Factory; Roubiliac was famous; the most
famous of Chelsea pieces, homogeneous in style, are marked with an R; there-
fore these pieces are the work of Roubiliac. The argument appears to have
been simultaneously started by Sir A. H. Church and the Schreiber Catalogue
in 1885, and has no weight of tradition behind it; deeply rooted as the belief
in its truth now is, we have to consider whether it is well founded.
In the first place, almost all of these R pieces are copies, and it is in the
highest degree improbable that a sculptor of such restless and conscious
originality, to the point of signing even his portraits invenit et fecit, should have
had anything to do with them. In the second, the subjects represented are
alien to his work elsewhere. Tight waists and hoop petticoats, coquettish
gestures and Arcadian sentiment, cocked hats and flowery boskage, simply do
not occur either in the long list of his existing works or in that yet longer Cata-
logue which included the very sweepings of his studio. We see there that he
possessed a very large number of plaster casts of his own work of all periods as
well as a number of terra-cotta models, as many as five for that of the Duchess of
Montagu, and no fewer than six and a mould for the trivial commission for
Hudson’s mantelpiece; and the number of moulds is a feature in the Catalogue
unparalleled in the sculptors’ catalogues of the period. We are therefore justi-
fied in saying that Roubiliac took unusual care in the preparation and preser-
vation of his work, and would be likely to have kept some record of his Chelsea