Louis XV

This bust is one of the most remarkable porcelain sculptures produced in the eighteenth century. It was made in the late 1750s in Tournai, a town located in present-day Belgium but part of the Austrian Netherlands at the time of the bust’s manufacture. The factory was established in 1750 by François-Joseph Peterinck (French, 1719–1799), who may have acquired the technical knowledge required to pro-duce soft- paste porcelain from the French potters Robert Dubois (French, 1709–1759) and Gilles Dubois (French, b. 1713).[1] The Dubois brothers had worked at Chantilly, Vincennes, and the Rue de Charenton factory in Paris before going to Tournai, and their experience at those factories appears to have been instrumental in the Tournai factory’s founding.[2]

The bust depicts Louis XV (1710–1774), king of France, and it is likely that it was produced at Tournai around 1756, when he was approximately forty-six years old. This date seems probable for the bust due to the close stylistic similarity and scale to another one made at Tournai that portrays Charles de Lorraine (Duchy of Lorraine, 1712–1780), which appears to be the bust cited in a letter from 1756.[3] The Museum’s bust of Louis XV is one of six known to have been made at Tournai,[4] and these busts, along with the bust of Charles, reflect an exceptional technical and artistic accomplishment for a factory founded less than a decade before their manufacture. Technically, the busts are remarkable for their size and for the difficulties of firing soft-paste porcelain on this scale. The technical challenges posed by the kiln are illustrated by the prominent firing crack that runs through the monarch’s wig at the back of his neck. The crack appears to have occurred during the first or so-called biscuit firing, and it was repaired shortly thereafter by inserting a mixture of ground-up porcelain and glaze that hardened during the second firing when the glaze was applied. It is a measure of the difficulty of producing porcelain sculpture of this scale and complexity that an obvious flaw, though repaired, was considered acceptable at the time of the bust’s manufacture.

The skill with which the bust is modeled, particularly evident in the details of the costume and in the expansive drapery that terminates at the torso of the king, provides a sense of movement and drama when seen from the back (detail, page 228). Few porcelain sculptures were produced of comparable scale and with an integral socle and base during the eighteenth century; it was more common for the base to be produced separately and then attached to the torso that it supported. The format of the Tournai busts of Louis XV closely follows the format established in the previous century for portraits of the monarch. Customarily executed in marble, royal portraits commonly depicted the sitter in a heroic mode wearing a cuirass, or armor breastplate, to symbolize military superiority. The positioning of the slightly lifted head, seen in three-quarter view, subtly communicates the monarch’s inherent nobility and authority.

It is highly likely that the model for the Tournai busts is derived from a lifesize marble bust of Louis XV by the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger (French, 1704–1778). In 1730 Lemoyne inherited from his father the commission for an equestrian monument to honor the French king, and he soon became the monarch’s favorite portraitist, producing an extensive series of busts from the early 1730s through Louis XV’s death in 1774.[5] While the Museum’s bust corresponds in format and style to several of Lemoyne’s portraits of the king, it is not a reduced version of any surviving marble or bronze bust. The Tournai bust bears similarities to Lemoyne’s marble portrait of Louis XV from 1757, which is now in the Museum,[6] but the Lemoyne marble differs in several specific aspects, and it appears to portray an older sitter whose face has filled out with the passage of time. It may be that the modeler at Tournai had access to a print of an earlier bust of Louis XV by Lemoyne, and while the porcelain bust was produced in the second half of the 1750s, it depicts the king at a younger age. The portrait of the king in the Tournai bust has more affinity with Lemoyne’s marble bust of Louis XV of 1749[7] than with his later bust, despite its being almost contemporaneous in date.

A marble bust of Louis XV made by Lemoyne in 1745 may have served as the model for a porcelain bust made at Chantilly[8] and for a similar bust produced in faience fine (white-glazed earthenware) at the Rue de Charenton factory,[9] and it is likely the busts were produced at both ceramic factories to honor the king at the height of his popularity. The Chantilly factory produced a second portrait of the king approximately ten years later,[10] and Sèvres made a variety of models of portrait busts of the king that were issued in different sizes.[11] It is not surprising that busts of the monarch were produced in several French ceramic factories; it is less clear why a factory in the Austrian Netherlands would choose to create an image of the French king with whom the country had recently been at war. It is possible that the Tournai factory wished to demonstrate its technical and artistic mastery, hoping to compete in a French market as well as prosper in a local one. This potential explanation is undermined, however, by the dominance of the French factories at Vincennes and at Sèvres after 1756, which must have been perceived as overwhelming competition to a young factory in the Austrian Netherlands without active royal patronage. In any event, Tournai continued to produce sculpture of high quality into the 1770s, but it rarely attempted to create a work of the scale or ambition as seen in its portrait of the French monarch.[12]


Footnotes
(For key to shortened references see bibliography in Munger, European Porcelain in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018)
1 For a history of the Tournai factory, see Blazy 1987, p. 25; Jottrand 1987; Dumortier and Habets 2010; Dumortier and Habets 2015, pp. 31–43.
2 It is tempting to link the Dubois brothers with the production of the Tournai Louis XV bust and its source in a bust by Jean- Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger, as the brothers had worked at two ceramic factories (Chantilly, Rue de Charenton) that made busts after Lemoyne models, but the periods in which the brothers worked at those factories do not coin-cide with the production of the busts. See Clare Le Corbeiller in Roth and Le Corbeiller 2000, p. 49, n. 12.
3 Dumortier and Habets 2015, p. 180, n. 33, and pp. 30, 186, fig. f.
4 There are examples in the Musée des Beaux- Arts, Dunkirk (Blazy 1987, p. 116, no. 101, ill.), the Musée Royal de Mariemont, Belgium (Deroubaix 1958, p. 227, no. 1942, pl. 60), and the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (J. J. Miller 1967, pp. 67–69, fig. 1); one was formerly in the Maurice Fenaille Collection (Hôtel Drouot, Paris, sale cat., June 12, 1941, no. 127), and another was in the sale at Sotheby’s, Monaco, June 15, 1996, no. 82.
5 Raggio 1967, p. 220.
6 Ibid., figs. 1, 4.
7 Réau 1927, pl. xxx.
8 Munger 1988.
9 Jeffrey Weaver in Droth 2009, pp. 44–47, no. 9.
10 Le Corbeiller in Roth and Le Corbeiller 2000, pp. 46–49, no. 20.
11 See, for example, Dawson 1994, pp. 119–21, no. 106.
12 An exception is the large allegorical group The Apotheosis of Charles d’Oultremont, Prince- Bishop of Liège of 1763–64 (private collection); Jottrand 1989, pp. 30, 32, pl. 7.