Updated 10 October 2025.
Madame Boccage née Le Page.
Born Rouen, Normandy, France on 22 October
1710 and died in Paris 8 August 1802.
The bust was perhaps donated to the Museum by Madame Boccage 1st August 1766.
The terracotta bust in the British Museum.
It is inscribed on the back of the shoulders - Par j-Bt Defernex-En-1766.
Height: 60.20 centimetres Width: 37 centimetres
Images above from the British Museum website -
Her bust in the British Museum and depicted here is
described as a terracotta portrait bust of Anne-Marie Le Page, Madame Fiquet du
Boccage (1710-1802) by Jean-Baptiste Defernex (1728-83), her head turned
slightly to right wearing a classical-style gown with a brooch at the shoulder
and a laurel wreath in her elaborately dressed hair. It was reported that
Voltaire had crowned her with laurels at an entertainment at Ferney - although
his motives were questioned. Traces of surface paint, it is probably hollow, on
a turned and waisted tapering socle, dated 1766. H. 60.2cms width 37cms. She
would have been 56 years old, She was described by admirers as Forma Venus,
Arte Minerva, Voltaire called her the Sappho of Normandy.
At the age of 17 she married Pierre - Joseph Fiquet du
Boccage (died August 1767), something of a poet and translator with a special
interest in English literature. After 1734 they spent 8 months of the year in
Paris holding a literary salon once a week at Rue de La Sourdiere attracting
international intellectuals. A proto feminist she wrote the play Les Amazones
performed in 1749. Her poetry included a version of Earthly Paradise imitating
Milton of 1748, she translated Alexander Pope's Temple of Fame in 1749. In 1756
she published Le Columbiadne which could also be seen as early feminist
literature. Her letters to her sister were published as Letters concerning
England Holland and Italy in England in 1776.
For the works of Madame Boccage, including her translation
of Milton and Pope see - Recueil des Oeuvres de Madame du Bocage, des Academies
de Padoue, de Bologne, de Rome, et de Lyon, published at Lyon, chez Les Freres
Perisse - 1762. Vol 1, with engraved portrait frontispiece -
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Madame Boccage
For her letters to
her sister see - Recueil des Oeuvres de Madame du Bocage, des Academies de
Padoue, de Bologne, de Rome, et de Lyon, published at Lyon, chez Les Freres
Perisse - 1762. Vol III, Lettres sur L'Angleterre, La Hollande et L'Italie.
14th Letter at Dieppe 30 July 1750.
In Memoires Secrets de Bechaumont -first published in London
from 1783 - 89, it is suggested that Dr Matthew Maty (1718 -76) was responsible
for adding this bust to the British Museum Collection.
Matthew Matey was also responsible for presenting to the
British Museum the 17 busts by Roubiliac, bought at the posthumous sale by
Langfords of the contents of the Roubiliac studio in St Martin's Lane.
He later became chief librarian at the Museum - Matthew Maty was of
Huguenot extraction, his family having moved from France to the Netherlands. He
had trained as a doctor at Leiden University and moved to London in 1740. He
practised as a physician but also moved in literary circles, he founded the
Journal Britannique in 1747 and falling out with Dr Samuel Johnson, who in 1756
described him as “that little black dog!”
He wrote Authentic Memoirs of the Life of Richard Meade
published in 1755.
Madame Boccage corresponded with Lord Chesterfield in
1750-52 and twelve of his letters to her were published by Dr Matthew Maty in
Miscellaneous Works of the late Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield:
consisting of letters to his friends, never before printed, and various other
articles. To which are prefixed, memoirs of his life, tending to illustrate the
civil, literary and political history of his time, 2 vols, London, 1777, vol.
II, pp.242-81, letters LXXXV-XCVI.
In the Chesterfield letters to Madame Boccage there are
several references to him giving her the busts of Pope, Milton, Dryden and
Shakespeare.
Chesterfield had asserted that "Roubiliac only was a
statuary, and all the rest were stone cutters" from The Gentleman's
Magazine, Vol 53 Jan. 1783.
Jean-Baptiste
Defernex(6) was born in the parish of Saint-Nizier, Lyon, on 26 January 1728.
He worked for his father, a master card-maker, who used carved wooden moulds.
His earliest known dated work is a signed bronze bust of the duc de Valentinois
dated 1750 in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris.(7) A terracotta bust of
Mademoiselle Marie Anne Botot d'Angeville is in the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.(8) It too is signed and bears the date 1752. In 1754 and 1755 Defernex
was working for the Vincennes/Sèvres factory on models for small-scale
sculpture in biscuit and glazed porcelain.(9) On 17 October 1760 he was
admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc and exhibited in the Salons of 1762 and
1774. In the 1777 Almanack des artistes he was described as 'sculpteur
statuaire de Mgr le duc d'Orléans'. He had been linked to this powerful family
since at least 1763 when he supplied decorative elements for the staircase for
the Palais Royal through the architect Contant d'Ivry. Defernex is best known
for his portrait busts in bronze, marble and terracotta, and for his petite
sculpture in biscuit porcelain for Sèvres.
She wrote to her sister
Horace Walpole wrote - There is come from France a Madame
Bocage, who has translated Milton: my Lord Chesterfield prefers the copy to the
original; but that is not uncommon for him to do, who is the patron of bad
authors and bad actors. She has written a play too, which was damned, and
worthy my lord's approbation.
Footnote - Madame du Boccage published a poem in imitation of Milton, and another founded on Gesner's "Death of Abel." She also translated Pope's "Temple of Fame;" but her principal work was "La Columbiade."
It was at the house of this lady, at Paris, in 1775, that Johnson was annoyed at her footman's taking the sugar in his fingers and throwing it into his coffee. "I was going," says the Doctor, "to put it aside, but hearing it was made on purpose for me, I e'en tasted Tom's fingers."
Mrs Thrale Letter in the Rylands Library - Mrs. Thrale occasionally could be very severe about the French!
This appears in her
account of a visit to dine with Madame de Bocage on October 5th 1775 :
" The Morning was spent in adjusting our Ornaments in
order to dine with Madame de Bocage at 2 o'clock. There was a showy Dinner with a Frame in the
middle, and she gave us an English Pudding made after the Receipt of
the Dutchess of Queensbury. We saw nothing particularly pleasing at this
Visit but the beauty of Madame de Bocages niece, the Countess of Blanchetre,
whose husband was so handsome too that being a Frenchman - I wonder'd.
In the course of conversation,
however, he turned out an Italian, and
there was another Italian Noble - man who hailed Baretti and made
himself agreable to us all. Nothing would serve him but attend us at
night to the Colissee which, after leaving our Names with the Sardinian
Ambassadress, we were willing enough to
permit. In Madame de Bocage's Drawing
room stood the Busts of Shakespear, Milton, Pope and Dryden, the lady sat on a
Sopha with a fine Red Velvet Cushion fringed with gold under her Feet and just
over her Head a Cobweb of uncommon
size & I am sure great Antiquity. A Pot to spit in, either of Pewter or Silver quite as black & ill-coloured, was on her
Table, & when the Servant carried Coffee about he put in Sugar
with his Fingers. The House these people live in is a fine one
but so contrived that we were to pass through
a sort of Hall where the Footmen were playing at Cards before we arrived
at Madame's Chamber."
Frontispiece from Le Paradis, poëme imité de Milton, Nouvelle édition, revue, corrigée, augmentee… Amsterdam [Rouen], [Jacques-Nicolas Besogne], 1748.
Marianne Loir.
Conservé et photographié par le musée d'Art
et d'Histoire d'Auxerre.
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