This post is part of a research project into a series of 11 excellent although uninscribed busts including one terracotta of Charles I and two plasters suggested here as modelled and sculpted by Louis Francois Roubiliac.
The main evidence provided is the very fine quality of the carving and the form of the socles on all of these busts which were (almost) exclusively used by Roubiliac on portrait busts with known histories or provenance.
It is also based on the use of this type of socle on 4 of the the drawings of the bust by Joseph Nollekens done at the time of the Roubiliac Sale of May 1762 now in the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston.
I have discovered 15 of these busts in marble and plaster see -
https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2025/05/marble-bust-of-laocoon.html
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The Bust of Sir Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron Le Despencer. (Dec 1708 - Dec 1781).
West Wycombe Park.
Suggested here as modelled by Louis Francois Roubiliac.
The Biographical dictionary of British Sculptors ..... pub Yale 2009 mentions two further busts of Francis Dashwood - A bust by John Bacon (1740 - 99) of c.1780 at West Wycombe park and a bust by Peter Scheemakers
A leading Tory MP, Dashwood served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1762 to 1763.
He is better known for creating the 'Monks of Medmenham Abbey': a club that mocked Catholic religious practices with feasting and fornication. - In 1743 Horace Walpole critically described the Dilettanti Society as "a club for which the nominal qualification is having been to Italy, and the real one, being drunk; the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood, who were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy".
Many senior public figures were also members including John Wilkes (1725 - 97) Sir George Lyttleton, John Montagu the 4th Earl of Sandwich, and the poet Paul Whitehead (1710 -74).
Wilkes and Whitehead were also sculpted by Roubiliac.
For the marble bust of Wilkes at the Guildhall, City of London and the busts of Paul Whitehead see -
For a measured look at the Hellfire Club see -
For a brief look at West Wycombe Park and the wider landscape including the "Hellfire Caves" see -
https://www.visitgardens.co.uk/sir-francis-dashwood/
Dashwood fell out with Wilkes after he
condemned Wilkes's obscene Essay on Woman (1763). His moral hypocrisy was
attacked in poems by Charles Churchill and in popular satirical prints. Dashwood
was also a leading light in the Society of Dilettanti and commissioned the
construction of West Wycombe Park and Church.
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Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron Le Despencer.
by John Faber Jr, dated 1753.
after Adrien Carpentiers (Carpentière,
Charpentière)
mezzotint, .
12 7/8 in. x 8 7/8 in. (327 mm x 225 mm) paper size.
Reference Collection
NPG D5032
Sir Francis Dashwood. Lord Le Despencer,
London, Society of Dilettanti.
Knapton’s portrait of Dashwood, for example, depicts a mock-Communion rite Dashwood wears the habit of a Franciscan friar. His tonsured head is surrounded by a halo, around whose perimeter runs an inscription in golden letters, “SAN FRANCESCO DI WYCOMBO” (a reference to Dashwood’s country seat, West Wycombe Park).
His right hand holds the base and his left the stem of a golden chalice, which is inscribed “MATRI SANCTORUM” (“to the mother of the saints”).
The object of Dashwood’s worship is the pudenda of the Venus de’ Medici, which Knapton has exposed by eliminating the statue’s left hand and emphasized by altering the position of the right leg. Rays of light connect the groin of this Venus impudica to the celebrant’s adoring eyes. Perhaps the picture’s most daring suggestion is that “San Francesco,” chalice in hand,
The paragraph above is lifted from - Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England by Bruce Redford, 2008. Available on line at -https://www.getty.edu/publications/resources/virtuallibrary/9780892369249.pdf
Society of Dilettanti, Brooks's Club, London.
Digital image courtesy of Society of Dilettanti, Brooks’s Club, London.
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