DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68074#0313
PERSONALIA 197
in music, Hogarth in art, and Garrick in the theatre are the mightiest figures
of their generation. With Molyneux and Mead for Medicine, Dormer and
Spencer Cowper for law, Hough for divinity, and Bentley for scholarship, our
cycle of representative names is almost complete; and whatever Colley
Cibber’s demerits as a laureate, or his equally indisputable gifts as dramatist
and causeur, few will deny that the purchase of Roubiliac’s bust of him for the
National Portrait Gallery has given his memory a new lease of life.
Roubiliac was a genius and a gentleman, as Allan Cunningham most justly
said; and if his reputation has suffered first from the Neo-Hellenism of Banks
and Flaxman, and afterwards, and more severely, from the purists of the
Gothic Revival, it is high time that the verdict of his contemporaries should
be explained and that of his successors reconsidered. How far have we a
right to claim him as an English sculptor ? He was a Frenchman born; he
learned his art abroad; he never really mastered the English language. But
in Paris he was looked upon as English, for the Journal Etranger for January,
1762, ends with the words: ‘Les Anglais viennent de perdre M. Roubilliac,
Sculpteur, qui a fait plusieurs ouvrages fort estimes dans sa patrie ’; he came
to England as a young man and seems never to have left this country save for
a three months’ visit, with three Englishmen, to Italy; one of his wives was
English; the whole of his known work was executed in England. Many of
his chosen friends were English of the English; figures more intensely national
than Hogarth and Fielding never breathed. He has long since triumphantly
passed the test of inclusion in the Dictionary of National Biography and that,
equally significant, of exclusion from Lady Dilke’s French Architects and Sculptors
of the Eighteenth Century; he married, lived, and died in the country he made his
own for nearly forty years, and proclaimed himself an English artist at the Ex-
hibitions of 1760 and 1761. The time has surely come to repudiate the asper-
sions of Ruskin and the Neo-Hellenists, and to assert his right to be considered
one of the greatest, most varied, and most accomplished figures in English
sculpture.
in music, Hogarth in art, and Garrick in the theatre are the mightiest figures
of their generation. With Molyneux and Mead for Medicine, Dormer and
Spencer Cowper for law, Hough for divinity, and Bentley for scholarship, our
cycle of representative names is almost complete; and whatever Colley
Cibber’s demerits as a laureate, or his equally indisputable gifts as dramatist
and causeur, few will deny that the purchase of Roubiliac’s bust of him for the
National Portrait Gallery has given his memory a new lease of life.
Roubiliac was a genius and a gentleman, as Allan Cunningham most justly
said; and if his reputation has suffered first from the Neo-Hellenism of Banks
and Flaxman, and afterwards, and more severely, from the purists of the
Gothic Revival, it is high time that the verdict of his contemporaries should
be explained and that of his successors reconsidered. How far have we a
right to claim him as an English sculptor ? He was a Frenchman born; he
learned his art abroad; he never really mastered the English language. But
in Paris he was looked upon as English, for the Journal Etranger for January,
1762, ends with the words: ‘Les Anglais viennent de perdre M. Roubilliac,
Sculpteur, qui a fait plusieurs ouvrages fort estimes dans sa patrie ’; he came
to England as a young man and seems never to have left this country save for
a three months’ visit, with three Englishmen, to Italy; one of his wives was
English; the whole of his known work was executed in England. Many of
his chosen friends were English of the English; figures more intensely national
than Hogarth and Fielding never breathed. He has long since triumphantly
passed the test of inclusion in the Dictionary of National Biography and that,
equally significant, of exclusion from Lady Dilke’s French Architects and Sculptors
of the Eighteenth Century; he married, lived, and died in the country he made his
own for nearly forty years, and proclaimed himself an English artist at the Ex-
hibitions of 1760 and 1761. The time has surely come to repudiate the asper-
sions of Ruskin and the Neo-Hellenists, and to assert his right to be considered
one of the greatest, most varied, and most accomplished figures in English
sculpture.