Hewetson - 39 - Conclusions.
Wednesday, 8 May 2024
Hewetson 38 - Attributed - The Portrait Bust of Prince Francis Xavier of Saxony (1730-1806).
Portrait Bust of Prince Francis Xavier of Saxony (1730-1806).
c. 1790.
White Marble.
Attributed to Christopher Hewetson.
The Tomasso Brothers Bust.
The following cut and pasted from the above website
Probably Prince Francis Xavier of Saxony, Rome, Italy, and
subsequently Dresden, Germany;
by descent to his daughter, Elisabeth Ursula Anna Cordula
Xaveria, Duchess d'Esclignac (1768-1844);
by descent to her daughter, Marie Charlotte Xaverine,
Baroness von Weissenbach (1788-1858);
by descent to her daughter, Johanna, Countess von
Korff-Schmising Kerssenbrock (1829-1906);
by descent to her daughter, Maria Xaverina Louisa, Baroness
de Weichs de Wenne, Castle Geijsteren, Limburg (1854-1927);
Certainly thence by family descent until 2014.
The present work corresponds closely in style and subject
matter to the type of portrait bust Hewetson was renowned for. The sitter,
Prince Francis Xavier of Saxony, was the second surviving son of Augustus III
of Poland (1696-1763). From 1765 until 1768 he acted as Regent to his nephew,
the infant Elector Frederick Augustus III of Saxony, performing in his name a
formal renunciation of the Polish Crown in favour of Stanislaw Poniatowski, as
was required by the treaty signed between Prussia and Russia on 11 April 1764.
In the same period Francis Xavier secretly married Countess Maria Chiara
Spinucci, former lady-in-waiting to his sister, the Dowager Electress Maria
Antonia. The union was considered below his rank and only officialised some
years later. After relinquishing his duties as Regent in 1768, the Prince moved
his family to France - where in 1774 his younger sister's son became king as
Louis XVI (1754-1793) - and lived there for twenty years under the assumed
title of Count of Lusatia. The family fled the country at the beginning of the
French Revolution and moved to Rome. The Countess died there in 1792 and some
years later Francis Xavier left the Eternal City to return to his native
Saxony, where he died in 1806. This places him in Rome towards the very end of
the 1780s and early 1790s, when Hewetson had just completed a monumental bust
of the philosopher Leibniz for the city of Hanover in Germany (1789-90), and a
portrait of the German-Italian artist Giovanni Pichler (1792), now in the
Protomoteca Capitolina in Rome. It is possible that the German element of both
these commissions was the trait d'union between Francis Xavier of Saxony and
Hewetson, but there is also another possibility.
In November 1793, Francis Xavier journeyed to Fermo for his
wife's solemn burial. This planned visit had prompted the town's authorities,
the Priori, to commission a pair of busts of the couple (see D. Silvagni, La
Corte e Società Romana nei secoli XVIII e XIX, Rome, 1883, II, p. 228). Already
in January 1793 they had asked their patron Cardinal Borgia to commission two
portrait busts of Maria Chiara and Francis Xavier, to be exhibited in the
Palazzo Priorale's main hall in time for the funeral. A nineteenth-century
document states that the Cardinal entrusted the work to "Monti e
Albicini", who are presumably to be identified with the Roman sculptors
Giovanni Monti and Carlo Albacini. Unfortunately, the bust of the Prince did
not please the Priori, who decided to hide it in a cupboard throughout Francis
Xavier's stay in Fermo. They duly expressed their dissatisfaction to Borgia in
a letter, noting the effigy looked nothing like the Prince and was also
remarkably disproportionate in comparison with his wife's much better executed
counterpart (for a full account of the Priori's commission, see Catani 2002).
The unfortunate pair of busts are to this day in Fermo, in the town's
Biblioteca, but it is possible that, following the Priori's complaints,
Cardinal Borgia decided to commission another bust of the Prince, this time
from an artist of unquestionable talent such as Hewetson. This the Priori must
have refused to acquire, both because Francis Xavier would by then have left
Fermo, and because of financial concerns (it appears the first pair of busts had
cost them a considerable sum of money). In other words, there is a possibility
that the present bust was originally executed by Hewetson for the Priori of
Fermo, under the patronage of Cardinal Borgia, but ultimately given to the
Prince instead. The portrait was inherited by the heirs of Maria Xaverina
Louisa, Baroness de Weichs de Wenne (d. 1927) and her genealogy shows a direct
matrilineal line down to one of the daughters of Francis Xavier of Saxony.
The composition perfectly represents the type of portrait
that an aristocrat and statesman such as Francis Xavier would have appreciated,
in the guise of a victorious Roman general yet with clearly recognizable facial
features. There is no mistaking the sitter's identity, given the aquiline nose,
strong brow, and pursed lips, which appear prominently in the painted portrait
of the Prince by Maurice Quentin de La Tour now in the Musée Antoine Lecuyer,
St-Quentin (fig. 1). In terms of the attribution, Hewetson's authorship is
confirmed by the present bust's parallels with the sculptor's oeuvre. The
shoulder-length bust format, with the head turning to one side, was a staple of
Neoclassical portraiture and is often adopted by Hewetson. In addition, details
such as the sitter's eyebrows and hair - described through meticulous, fluent
modelling - and the manner in which the eyelids are outlined, are also typical
of the Irish artist, as evidenced by comparison with his Pope Clement XIV now
in the Victoria & Albert Museum (fig. 2), or his Anton Rafael Mengs in the
Promoteca Capitolina (fig. 3). Similarly, the skin on Francis Xavier's face,
with its wrinkled forehead and lined cheeks, shows an attention to the material
quality of flesh, even its weight, that are also visible in the Clement XIV and
Mengs. As scholar Malcolm Baker has noted, Hewetston's works betray a unique
sensitivity in the depiction of facial phsyiognomy and, particularly, hair. A
fascinating rediscovery, the present bust is therefore a major addition to the
oeuvre of one of the foremost interpreters of Roman Neoclassicism.
We are grateful to Stefano Grandesso for suggesting the
attribution to Christopher Hewetson.
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