BISCUIT BUST OF LOUIS XV

after the model for an equestrian monument by Edme Bouchardon (1698-1762)

Louis XV is depicted with a laurel wreath, and wearing a cloak over a cuirass with two griffins in relief.

The 18th century wooden base has a gilt bronze mount with the inscription "VIVE LE BIEN AIME" in a cartouche with a laurel swag pendant from two lion heads.

French, Mennecy, soft paste porcelain, circa 1765

Height: bust alone 6 1/2 in. (16.5 cm) with base 10 7/8 in. (27.5 cm)

The equestrian statue commissioned from Edmé Bouchardon by the city of Paris in 1748 for the Place de la Concorde was the most important work of the sculptor's career . His student Louis-Claude Vassé made several bronze and plaster reductions while the work was underway but it was Jean-Baptiste Pigalle who was chosen by the master to see the monument to its completion in 1763, almost a year after its author's death. Pigalle also made reductions in plaster and bronze in 1763 for the city of Paris and private persons including Madame de Pompadour. There are three extant bronze reductions, all with variations, that are believed to date from the 18th century in the Louvre, Versailles and Buckingham Palace, respectively. The version in the English royal collections corresponds to a surviving plaster (photo Documentation du Louvre) and the two can be ascribed to Pigalle by virtue of their resemblance to the finished monument as engraved by Prevost. The present porcelain displays the detail of griffins on the cuirass shared with all the examples of Bouchardon's model but the relatively younger face of the king is shared only with the Buckingham Palace bronze and corresponding plaster.

This porcelain bust represents a rarity. It corresponds in paste and scale to a small body of figural work produced at the Mennecy factory. William B. Honey refers to (but does not illustrate) a glazed white bust of Louis XV in his discussion of the few outstanding examples of sculpture from Mennecy in French Porcelain of the 18th Century, 1950, p. 21. Further "6 bustes représentant Louis XV" are listed under "Figures en biscuit" in the 1765 inventory of Mennecy porcelain wares in the stock of the Paris dealer Charles Hennique (Nicole Duchon in her monograph La Manufacture de Porcelaine de Mennecy Villeroy, Le Mee-sur-Seine, 1988, p. 149).