Archival References: IGI; Flaxman Leases; Grantham Correspondence; Flaxman Papers BL, Add MS 39791, fols 3, 120, 124-8, 196
Will: PROB 11/1390, 225-6
Auctions Catalogues: Flaxman 1803
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The Two Laughing Boys sold by Bonham's Auctions, London.
18 April 2012.
The porcelain boy Lot 174 and a terracotta boy Lot 175.
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Bonham's Essay -
They don't say who wrote it!
The only other recorded example is in the Ashmolean Museum
in Oxford, described by Dr Nicholas Penny as '...the most celebrated piece of
porcelain in the Ashmolean Museum...' (Penny 1992, p.17). It was donated by
Cyril da Costa Andrade in 1965, in honour of Sir Winston Churchill and was
originally from the collection of C.T. Fowler who is said to have discovered it
in a London shop, shortly before August 1938. From 1938 until the discovery of
the present lot in 2011, the Ashmolean head was thought be unique. The Oxford
head has been painted with enamel colours, possibly at a slightly later date.
The decoration does not follow the modelling, with tiny teeth painted below the
upper lip and some hair on the forehead represented where there is no
corresponding relief. There are significant areas of black kiln specking on the
surface of the enamelled head, most notably in a crescent-shaped patch above
the left breast and under the chin. There is also some lighter specking on the
face and forehead and on the back of the right shoulder. The newly-discovered
head has been left in white, as the potter must have intended and although it
exhibits some very light kiln specking, this is far less evident compared with
the enamelled piece.
The Ashmolean head was published by Dr Bellamy Gardner in
The Connoisseur of August 1938, pp. 59-60, illustrated in colour on the cover.
Gardner attributed the modelling to Louis-François Roubiliac and went further
by suggesting that it was a portrait of Roubiliac's daughter, Sophie. Gardner's
assertion appears to be based solely on the fact that Sophie's godfather was
fellow Huguenot, Nicholas Sprimont, who became the proprietor of the Chelsea
factory. A search for sources of the head suggests that it was unlikely to have
been made as a portrait and instead is drawn from 17th century Italian
sculpture.
In his 1992 catalogue Dr Penny hints at possible sources of
inspiration, starting with major works by Bernini in Rome. Two of the most
celebrated of Bernini's angels are his magnificent Angel Administering
Intolerable Pleasures to St Teresa, in the church of S Maria della Vittoria,
and his equally dramatic Angel Lifting Habbakkuk by a Lock of Hair, in the
Chigi Chapel of S Maria del Popolo. These predate Bernini's Gloria in the
Cathedra Petri in St Peter's Basilica, a monumental gilded relief carved with
joyful angels, created between 1657 and 1666. These Bernini angels and the
Chelsea head seem to share the same cheeks, mouths and pointed locks of hair.
They differ in the way the Chelsea model exhibits slanting eyes and a slightly
more exotic look, which Dr Penny suggests may be the result of the development
of Bernini's style by Permoser.
Like most Baroque sculptors, Balthasar Permoser was heavily
influenced by Bernini, while in turn Permoser was even more influential on so
many sculptors who came across his work. After fourteen years working in the
studio of Giovanni Battista Foggini in Florence, Permoser was summoned to
Dresden to work for the Elector of Saxony, and then to Prussia to work on the
Charlottenburg Palace. He is best known for his architectural sculptures on the
Zwinger palace, built by Augustus the Strong from 1710-28. On a smaller scale,
but equally ambitious was another commission from Augustus for a sculptural
pulpit for the Elector's chapel. Liberally strewn with angels' heads,
Permoser's pulpit was made of polished white marble and bears an uncanny
resemblance to porcelain. Porcelain was Augustus's overriding obsession and he
also asked Permoser to create models on a much smaller scale for Meissen,
figures to be made in polished red stoneware and in white porcelain.
Among the many students who trained in Permoser's Dresden
studio was a young sculptor from Lyon named Louis-François Roubiliac. The young
Frenchman returned to Paris but was frustrated that his work was not
appreciated in his own country and instead he moved to London. Roubiliac joined
the community of Huguenot artists living in London and forged a career as a
sculptor of monuments and portrait busts. Roubiliac married in St
Martin's-in-the-Fields in 1735 and when his daughter, Sophie, was born in 1744 he
asked his friend Nicholas Sprimont to stand as Godfather, her christening held
at the Huguenot church in Spring Gardens (Adams 2001, p.19).
Roubiliac and Sprimont must have been more than simply like-minded acquaintances. At the time Sprimont was establishing his porcelain factory in Chelsea, the sculptor was working on his first major monument, a funeral work commemorating Bishop Hough, to be erected in Worcester Cathedral.
Malcolm Baker, in his paper to the English Ceramic Circle (Baker 1997), drew
attention to a letter written by Theophilus Biddolph on 7 May 1745 which
discussed the monument at length. An important feature of the commission was a
bas relief panel to be incorporated within the monument. Biddolph had visited
Roubiliac's workshop to check on progress and in his letter he mentions 'The
Basso Relievo is to be in Chelsea China'.
The porcelain panel was never created and the monument was
instead carved entirely in marble. The letter, however, shows that in the first
months of the Chelsea venture, Roubiliac was contemplating using the new
material of porcelain for a monumental sculptured plaque. Roubiliac will have
worked in Permoser's studio in Dresden at the time when Permoser was modelling
for Meissen porcelain. Moving to England, the idea of his own work being cast
in porcelain must have seemed an impossible dream for Roubiliac. The prospect
of working with Sprimont to create a porcelain panel must have excited both men
enormously, though it would appear this particular collaboration did not come
to fruition.
In order to appreciate the excitement caused by Sprimont's
new Chelsea porcelain, it is worth reviewing the history of porcelain figures
in England prior to the mid 1740s. Before Chelsea, the only porcelain
sculptures available were Chinese figures, the pagods and magots collected in
the grandest of homes and mocked by William Hogarth. In his series Marriage a
la Mode, one well known image shows the playboy hero before his mantelshelf
where he has gathered a profusion of slender Guanyins and podgy Buddhas. These
were the Dehua figures of blanc-de-chine which had been imported en-mass from
China half a century earlier. No longer available from the East, these white
Chinese porcelain ornaments had achieved iconic status in the age of rococo and
were sold by dealers in fashionable St James's. The Adventurer of November 20th
1753 published a fictional account of a visit to Bedlam and introduced the
reader to Harriet Brittle, whose 'opinion was formerly decisive at all
auctions.....about the genuineness of porcelain.' Harriet paid an exorbitant
price for 'a Mandarin and a Jos' that she intended to place 'in a little
rockwork temple of Chinese architecture, in which neither propriety,
proportion, nor true beauty, were considered'. When a careless wagon driver
smashed her priceless figures, this completely turned her mind. To soothe poor
Harriet, her family provided her with Chelsea vases and urns to decorate her
cell in Bedlam as she believed these to be real Chinese porcelain.
Among other costly trinkets of silver and gold, the London
dealers around St James's and The Haymarket offered society customers 'Old
China' and 'Old Japan', antiques of their day and far more precious than the
cheaper Chinese tableware which, thanks to the East India Company, was now
readily available and falling in price. A few shops sold Dresden China,
enormously costly and in very limited supply, pretty porcelain enamelled in
colours and in European, not Oriental taste.
As a silversmith in London with origins in Europe, Nicholas
Sprimont was well aware of the marketplace for luxury goods. By embarking on a
porcelain manufactory, he knew that there was more to success than simply
producing perfectly white chinaware. The biggest problem was manufacturing
porcelain cheaply enough to compete in the shops with the antiques and imports.
There was no point trying to make blue and white or even famille rose teasets
or armorial dinner plates. Enamelled decoration added enormously to
manufacturing costs. Sprimont's greatest asset was an almost pure white
porcelain glaze, better than anybody else in England had yet perfected. He also
understood fashionable design from his work as a silversmith. Bringing his two
materials, silver and porcelain together was pure genius. Making the very
latest English silver shapes in white porcelain meant these could be sold as
something unique.
Silver forms, closely related to objects known to have been
made in Sprimont's silver workshop in Soho, are to be found in early
Triangle-period Chelsea porcelain. There can be no clearer evidence that
Sprimont was the designer, if not also the modeller. In his introduction to the
Victoria and Albert Museum's Rococo exhibition catalogue (Mallett 1984, p.237),
John Mallett quoted the enamel artist André Rouquet who reported of the Chelsea
factory that 'an able French artist supplies or directs the models of everything
that is manufactured there'. Mallett noted that Sprimont came from Liège, from
a family of silversmiths, so technically he was Flemish, not French, Liège
being part of the Holy Roman Empire at that time. Mallett agreed with Rouquet
that in the early days of the Chelsea factory Sprimont is likely to have done
all of the modelling and designing. There can be little doubt that the Teaplant
teawares originated from the mind of a silversmith, and even curiosities such
as Chelsea's Chinamen teapots share the whimsy of Sprimont's rococo silver
designs. Adams 2001, p.19 describes a Sprimont silver tea kettle dated 1745/6
with a dragon spout and a laughing Chinaman on the cover.
Sprimont may have picked up the idea behind the Chelsea
teapots when he was in France, from the white china Magots made at St Cloud.
These would have been unknown in England, however and more likely it was old
Dehua Blanc-de-Chine that inspired Sprimont's Chinaman teapots and also the
Chelsea Budai made during the Triangle period. Together with a slightly later
seated Guanyin, this was the only exercise in directly copying the Orient in
early Chelsea. Sprimont did not want his Chelsea porcelain to be associated
with mere copies of the Chinese. Stoneware potters in Staffordshire made their
cheaper versions in white saltglaze. Sprimont, though, was making something
that could not be bought anywhere else in England. His porcelain was aimed at
an altogether more refined market. Here was an artist making fine sculpture,
not craftsman-made crockery.
Horace Walpole appreciated the new material and bought a
pair of white Crayfish salts for his collection at Strawberry Hill (these are
now in the British Museum, 1887,0307,II.18). Sprimont's shell-shaped dishes and
modelled creamjugs were close to perfection, but some of the three-dimensional
modelling was not perhaps up there with the finest art. A squirrel and an owl
are comical, yes, but not perhaps best sculpture. Sprimont's talents lay as a
silversmith and designer, not a sculptor, yet he moved in the highest artistic
circles in London and mingled with the top painters and sculptors.
Casts of great works were readily available to purchase,
either in bronze or plaster. Small sculptures by Francois Duquesnoy, known as
Il Fiammingo, inspired two small models in white Chelsea porcelain, a sleeping
child and a boy's head. The sleeping child was also made in porcelain at
Vincennes and while it is debateable which factory made it first, the French
version probably post-dates the Chelsea and is likely to have been based on the
same bronze prototype. The head of a boy first appeared as a detail on a tomb
in Rome carved by Il Fiammingo and Sprimont must have acquired a cast.
Chelsea's version is delightfully subtle, though some of the sculptural quality
was lost along the way.
The boy's head was probably not made until 1749-50, whereas
the Chelsea sleeping child in the British Museum is incised with the date June
ye 26 1746 and exhibits the slightly creamy glaze which is characteristic of
the earliest figure models. The present Head of a Laughing Child appears whiter
and reflects the rapid improvements made to the Chelsea body during the
Triangle Period. This brilliant white porcelain was an entirely new material
for sculpture in England.
Porcelain sculpture had been made elsewhere in Europe before
the 1740s. Models in Meissen white porcelain had been created for Augustus the
Strong's palace and a stunning Böttger Porzellan head of Apollo is well known,
as well as a baby's head. Roubiliac undoubtedly came across such things while
training in Permoser's Dresden studio, but this is not the kind of Meissen
retailed by the dealers in London amongst their 'Old Dresden'. In Italy the
Doccia factory made some of the most striking of all European porcelain
sculpture, much of it after Classical antiquities. As with Vincennes, however,
most Doccia sculpture post-dates Chelsea and here again there is no evidence to
suggest any white Doccia sculptures had been seen in England at the time of
Sprimont's early productions. In London in 1746, therefore, Chelsea's white
porcelain sculptures were unique.
So what about the present Head of a Laughing Child and the
important question of whether Roubiliac provided Sprimont with the model? We
know that in September 1744 Sprimont had stood as Godfather for baby Sophie
Roubiliac and the following year Louis-François Roubiliac considered using
Chelsea china for part of his monument to Bishop Hough. All other evidence is
circumstantial, however. One strong pointer to the Child's parentage is the
existence in white Chelsea porcelain of two separate models of William Hogarth's
dog Trump, one a mirror image of the other. John Mallet has shown that
Chelsea's Trumps were taken from a terracotta by Roubiliac and that Sprimont
will have acquired a version in terracotta, or possibly a plaster cast,
directly from Roubiliac's studio (Mallet 1967). White Chelsea models of Trump
are in the Colonial Williamsburg Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum
(C.101-1966), while a coloured version, illustrated here, was one of the
treasures at Rous Lench Court.
Terracotta versions of a similar, though not identical Head
of a Laughing Child are well known and an example is offered in this sale as
the following lot. Numerous versions of this model are recorded in bronze,
marble, terracotta and plaster and these have been discussed by Penny 1992,
Baker 1997 and others. Most are given 18th century dates although they all
probably postdate the Chelsea model. The only signed example so far recorded is
a marble version in the Hermitage in St Petersburg which is signed by Joseph
Nollekens RA. A plaster or possibly terracotta version appears in a painting in
the Royal Academy, showing the artist John Hamilton Mortimer with Joseph Wilton
and a Student. This fascinating painting, probably a self portrait by Mortimer,
depicts a student using the Duke of Richmond's Cast Gallery, a collection of
plaster casts after the Antique made available to students c.1758-62 under the
direction of the sculptor Joseph Wilton. The version of the Child's Head placed
at the side of the composition bears a striking similarity to the Chelsea
model.
It seems likely that all these related versions, including
the Chelsea one, originate from the same source. The Head of a Laughing Child
has become popularly known as 'Roubiliac's Daughter', an attribution probably
resulting from Dr Bellamy Gardner's 1938 article discussing the Chelsea
version. There is presently no known autograph version that can be linked
unquestionably to Roubiliac's workshop, but as most surviving versions have a
British provenance, an authorship by Roubiliac does seems most likely. Following
Roubiliac's death in 1762 the contents of his studio were auctioned and the
sale included various items that may be related. In the sale were moulds of 'a
young child', 'a laughing boy' and 'a boy's head', as well as a plaster model
of a 'crying boy'. These are discussed on the Victoria and Albert Museum
Website in relation to a pair of bronze busts in the Museum collection nos.
A.2-2008 and A.3-2008.
These 18th century busts in the Victoria and Albert museum
comprise a bronze laughing head paired with the head of a crying child. No
Chelsea crying head is recorded, but the existence of a companion model in
bronze does suggest the Head of a Child was intended to be a likeness not of
Roubiliac's daughter but that of an infant philosopher. The so-called 'Laughing
and Weeping Philiosphers', Heraclitus and Democritus, were well-known subjects
in art and sculpture as opposing images of Joy and Sorrow, reflecting different
attitudes to life. Penny 1992, p. 18 discusses many different versions where
the subjects are depicted as children. Roubiliac would therefore have been very
familiar with the concept.
Some of the surviving bronze and terracotta versions will
most likely correspond to the 'Laughing Boy' and 'Crying Boy' models included
in Roubiliac's studio sale. Logic suggests that Sprimont will have acquired one
of the terracotta versions, in the same way as he used a terracotta from
Roubiliac's studio to create his Chelsea porcelain model of Hogarth's Trump.
There are significant differences, however, between the bronze, terracotta and
plaster versions and the Chelsea porcelain Head of a Laughing Child. Heraclitus
and Democritus as children are by necessity male. In the Chelsea version, the
sex of the child is more ambiguous.
The Chelsea head is not cast from any known terracotta or
plaster version. In the porcelain version the mouth is closed with no hint of
teeth and the eyes, too are almost closed. The subject is smiling rather than
laughing. In these respects the Chelsea head differs from all the other known
versions. If the origin was a terracotta, such as the following lot in this
sale, someone has totally re-modelled it before the casting in porcelain.
This prompts the question of whether Nicholas Sprimont was
up to the job? Did Sprimont simply take Roubiliac's model and adapt it, or did
Sprimont ask Roubiliac himself to recreate a new model to be cast in porcelain?
There can be no doubt that the modeller of the Chelsea Head of a Laughing Child
was a very accomplished sculptor, far more accomplished than the modeller of,
say, the Chinaman teapots. If the task was given to Roubiliac, it is worth
remembering that his daughter Sophie would have been between three and five
years old. Was Dr Gardner right all along? Was his own daughter in the
sculptor's mind when he created the unique mould for Chelsea?
The end of the Triangle Period marks a significant change in
direction for the Chelsea factory, coinciding with the move from Mr Supply's
House to new expanded premises in Lawrence Street. Sprimont gave up his
silversmith business in Soho to give his full attention to developing porcelain
'in a Taste Entirely New'. Instead of his own ideas and models based on silver,
totally new productions were almost entirely copied from the best foreign
porcelain. This meant copies of the latest designs from Vincennes and Meissen
and from old Japanese Kakiemon.
Realising he needed an experienced modeller full-time within
the factory, it was probably in 1748 that Sprimont brought in Joseph Willems
who was also Flemish. A major new series of bird models was introduced, based
on prints by George Edwards, while Sprimont's new financial backer, Sir Everard
Falconer arranged to borrow Sir Charles Hanbury Williams' extensive collection
of Meissen figures and every piece was copied exactly. A taste entirely new
indeed.
Very few of Sprimont's designs from the Triangle period
survived the changes in direction that swept through his business. Crayfish
salts, formerly made largely in white, were now issued in new colours. After
1750 fine white porcelain was no longer the sole domain of Chelsea. Some truly
magnificent models came from the kilns at Derby during the so-called 'Dry Edge'
period, while the Muses Modeller's work at Bow presented the London market with
a very different kind of English porcelain figure. Sprimont's former business
partner, Charles Gouyn now produced white figure groups at St James's, but to
Nicholas Sprimont white porcelain had apparently lost its appeal. His new
models copied from Meissen are rarely found in white; indeed the little
Chinaman in this sale is an exception.
Sir Everard Falconer was secretary to the Duke of Cumberland
and Faulkner no doubt encouraged the production of a white porcelain portrait
bust of the Duke, made at Chelsea during the Raised Anchor period. This bust of
Cumberland is disappointing as a piece of sculpture. Some old white stock from
the Triangle period was probably coloured during the Raised Anchor period, and
this raises again the question of precisely when the colouring was added to the
Rous Lench Trump and the Ashmolean Head of a Child. Were these coloured at
Lawrence Street, perhaps?
For more than fifty years visitors to Oxford have been able
to admire the Ashmolean's coloured head in its own case in the Chambers Hall
Gallery among 18th century British paintings. With this newly discovered
example in pure white porcelain it is possible to appreciate in full the unique
sculptural quality of the model. In every respect the Head of a Laughing Child
is a true masterpiece of European porcelain.
Bibliography,
.................................
The Bonhams Terracotta Laughing Boy.
18 April 2012.
Lot 175.
Height 22.3 cms.
Provenance Mrs. Kenrick. with Thos. Agnews & Son Ltd., London (no. 9367).
It was exhibited in Canterbury, 1937, lent by Mrs Kenrick (according to an old label attached to the stretcher).
An alternative attribution to Henry Walton (c.1746-1813) has
been put forward by Evelyn Bell.
see - The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare's Fine Frenzy in Late 18th Century British Art, William Pressy, 2007.
From the Website of Timothy Millett - a highly recommended dealer
http://www.historicmedals.com/viewItem.php?no=1643&b=1&img=B
