Literature:
A Catalogue of the Genuine and Curious Collection of Mr. Michael Rysbrack, of
Vere-Street, near Oxford Chapel, Statuary,…which will be sold by Auction, by Mr
Langford and Son, at their house in the Great Piazza, Covent Garden, on Saturday the
20 of this Instant April 1765, lot 32.
M. I. Webb, Michael Rysbrack Sculptor, London, 1954, p. 186, and n. 5 on p. 186.
Katharine Eustace, ‘The key is Locke: Hogarth, Rysbrack and the Foundling
Hospital’, The British Art Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Autumn 2006), pp. 34-49.

Comparative Literature:
Bevis Hillier, in Chapter 2, ‘The End of the Baroque’, The Social History of the
Decorative Arts, Pottery and Porcelain, 1700- 1914, (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1968), pp 46-65.
Katharine Eustace (ed.), Michael Rysbrack, Sculptor, 1694-1770 , City of Bristol
Museums and Art Galleries, 1982 (exh cat).
N. Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, 1540 to the
Present Day, Oxford, 1992, Vol. III, no. 457, pp. 17-19.
Katharine Eustace, ‘Robert Adam, Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Michael Rysbrack and
the Hopetoun Chimneypiece’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 139, No. 1136 (Nov.,
1997), pp. 743-752.
Zorka Hodgson ,’Chelsea Boy’s Head after Francois Duquesnoy – Il Fiammingo’, ECC
Transactions, Vol 15, Part 2 (1994), pp. 184-9.
Hilary Young, English porcelain, 1745-95: its makers, design, marketing and
consumption, London, 1999.
Malcolm Baker, Figured in Marble: the Making and Viewing of Eighteenth Century
Sculpture, London, 2000.
Andrea Bacchi, Catherine Hess and Jennifer Montagu, eds., Bernini and the Birth of
Baroque Portrait Sculpture, Los Angeles and Ottawa, 2008 (exh. cat).
G. J. V Mallet, ‘Some Baroque sources of English ornamental porcelains’, a paper
read at the weekend seminar ‘Fire and Form – The Baroque and its influence on
English Ceramics, c. 1660-1760’, 26th-27th March 2011, published by the English
Ceramics Circle, 2013, pp. 123-146

The recently discovered marble bust of a young boy (Fig. 1), with its English
provenance, is undoubtedly that listed under the heading ‘Busts in Marble’ as, lot 32,
the bust ‘of a little Boy, after Fiamingo’, in the catalogue of the sale of Michael
Rysbrack’s works (during the sculptor’s lifetime, and on his retirement) by the
auctioneer Langford in Covent Garden on 20 April 1765.1 The marble bust bears
neither the inscribed name of any sculptor nor a date, but nothing turns on that, as on
stylistic grounds alone, it is undoubtedly the work of Rysbrack; and in any event
Rysbrack only infrequently signed portrait busts of his own invention, so he is
unlikely to have signed a bust produced by him in marble where the model was not
his own creation but that of his predecessor sculptor and compatriot, François
Duquesnoy, (‘Il Fiamingo’ or ‘Il Fiammingo’) (‘The Fleming’) (Brussels,1597– 1643,Livorno).

Even in his lifetime, as evidenced by the catalogues of sale of his work,
Rysbrack acknowledged his debt to Duquesnoy by ensuring that his illustrious
predecessor was credited with the invention of works Rysbrack carved after
Duquesnoy’s models. Indeed, he recognised the additional value accruing to his own
works from their close association with the work of Il Fiamingo.
Born in Antwerp in 1694, Rysbrack (who went to London about 1720 and died there

in 1770) is one of the most important sculptors to have practised his art in 18th-
century Europe, and was the leading sculptor in Britain between 1720 and the mid-
1740s, remaining one of the leading sculptors in Britain until his retirement in the mid-1760s.

A maker of funerary monuments, statues, portrait busts, marble fireplaces,
reliefs and architectural and decorative items and pieces of furniture, Rysbrack can be
credited with taking the first steps that led English sculpture out of the provincial
backwater in which it had languished for many centuries. In short, and of particular
relevance to his statues, funerary monuments and busts (which comprised by far the
part of his oeuvre), Rysbrack was one of the two finest portraitists (the other being the
French sculptor Louis François Roubiliac, 1702-62)2 in England between the death of
the painter Sir Godfrey Kneller (1723) and the arrival in London in 1753 of Joshua
Reynolds. Save for William Hogarth and Allan Ramsay (the latter of whom had
settled in London by about 1739), there were almost no first-class portrait painters in
England at the time that left a body of work of outstanding merit. This makes the
work of the marble portrait carver such as Rysbrack even more significant, and ‘when
compared with the painted portraits of the time the sculptured portraits will be found
to rank very high’.3 As Matthew Craske has remarked, ‘the monuments and busts of
Rysbrack and his competitors can justly be regarded as the forbears of the grand
portraits of the aristocracy that were the speciality of Reynolds and Gainsborough.’4
The prodigious production of portrait busts, statues and monuments by Rysbrack in
the two decades or so following his arrival in 1720, epitomises the extensive, if not
entirely novel, employment of classical precedent in the eighteenth century, and is
perhaps seen to best effect in Rysbrack’s celebrated busts of Lord George Hamilton,
1st Earl of Orkney (1733, Private Collection) and Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of
Nottingham, c. 1723 (Victoria and Albert Museum, Mus. No. A.6-1999). The
influence of Rysbrack, a pupil of the Antwerp sculptor Vervoort – whose own Baroque
idiom was tinged with classicism – in the development of the classical tradition in
England was of the utmost importance and it has been remarked that ‘the main theme
which runs through nearly all his work and makes it a coherent whole is the classical
theme, the theme of heroes in Greek or Roman dress, classical draperies and more or
less static poses.’5
As regards Rysbrack’s marble bust of a boy and its link to Il Fiamingo, Jennifer
Montagu has written that,
‘It was for his putti that Dusuesnoy was most famous in his own day, and
ever afterward. The three tombs that he made on his own designs are adorned
exclusively with putti, that of Adrien Vryburch [or Vryburgh] in Santa Maria
dell’Anima [Rome] of 1628-9, that of Ferdinand van den Eynden [Santa Maria
dell’Anima] undated (Van den Eynden died in 1634) and all that remains of the
uncompleted tomb of Jacob de Hase in the Campo Santo Teutonico [after 1634]’.6
John Mallet has continued the narrative thus:

‘Bellori [Giovan Pietro Bellori (1613-96), Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors
and Architects, Rome, 1672 ] prints an adulatory letter written by Rubens to thank
Fiammingo for casts that the sculptor had sent him from Rome of the cherubs on the
Van Eynde monument, which shows one way in which Fiammingo’s work could
exercise its influence far afield. Jerome Duquesnoy of Antwerp, heir to the contents
of his brother’s Rome studio when the latter died prematurely in 1643, was in 1654
burned at the stake for homosexual proclivities, causing Fiammingo’s models to be
dispersed by sale in the South Netherlands, thus presumably hastening the spread of il
Fiammingo’s works through northern Europe.’ 7
It is well-known that putti from Il Fiamingo’s funerary monuments served as models
for painters and sculptors, and in 1968, while writing on Duquesnoy’s putti in Rome,
Rudolf Wittkower remarked that ‘the conception of the Bambino became a general
European property and consciously or unconsciously most later representations of
small children are indebted to him’.8 Even in the late eighteenth century Duquesnoy’s
children remained highly valued, and the then leading London sculptor Joseph
Nollekens RA (1737-1823), when enquiring of Panton Betew of Compton Street, the
silversmith and dealer in pictures and other works of art, ‘What do you want for that
model of a boy?’, received the curt reply from Betew, ‘Why, now, can’t you say
Fiammingo’s boy? You know it to be one of his, and you also know that no man ever
modelled boys better than he did. It is said that he was employed to model children
for Rubens to put into his pictures’.9 Mallet has noted that an unattributed funerary
wall-monument in Saint James’s, Piccadilly, London, by an as yet unidentified
sculptor
‘to a Frenchman who became the First Earl of Lifford and died in 1749 …bears
witness to Fiammingo’s enduring international popularity. The figures on the
monument are closely copied from Fiammingo’s second monument in Santa Maria
dell’Anima, to Ferdinand Van den Eynde, completed between 1633-1640. The Lifford
monument, though, adopts from the Vryburgh monument the idea of placing the
inscription on a fictive cloth.’10
Given Rysbrack’s origins in Antwerp and, as noted by Malcolm Baker, the sculptor’s
considerable output of ‘Duquesnoy-like heads’,11 which appear throughout his oeuvre
(other than portrait busts of unidentified individuals, although even there they appear
to have inspired one particular bust), it is unsurprising that he should have produced
(for specific patrons or even as a speculation, or possibly even for his own enjoyment)
marble versions of Il Fiamingo’s boys. Katharine Eustace has succinctly provided the
context:
Rysbrack was trained in a Northern European, specifically Flemish tradition, in which
infants secular and angelic had, throughout the seventeenth century, provided the
subject of ornament on monuments, in interior decoration and as objects of vertù in
marble, bronze, terracotta, ivory and stucco. His fellow countryman …François
Duquesnoy (1597-1643), Il Fiamingo, had established the genre, to the extent that his
name is synonymous with the type. Rysbrack’s master, Michael Van der Voort
(1667-1737), employed these small naked children on monuments such as that to
Ambroise de Precipiano (d1707, Malines Cathedral), and as a rustic Cupid to his
Venus (Royal Museum, Antwerp). A life-size crying boy in contemporary dress by

Putti appear in many of Rysbrack’s marble fireplaces, architectural works, and on
funerary monuments. These include the figures in relief on the fireplaces in the Court
Room of the Foundling Museum, London (1745-6), the fireplace made for the East
India Office, London (1729), and the fireplace in the Red Drawing Room at Hopetoun
House, West Lothian (1756-8) (the latter to the design of Robert Adam, Charles-Louis
Clérisseau); the two full-figure putti reclining upon the pediment over a door in the
Stone Hall at Houghton Hall Norfolk (1726-32), the two putti supporting an
architrave in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Museum No. A.4-1990, c. 1730), the
putti in relief on the decorative panel of the Allegory of Water with Putti Playing with
a Dolphin (National Galleries of Scotland, , acc. no. NG 2615, c. 1725-30); and the
putti in relief or angels in the round on the monuments to Sir Godfrey Kneller
(1723-30), Sir Isaac Newton (1727-31), and John Gay (1736) all in Westminster
Abbey, to Harriot Bouverie at Coleshill, Berkshire (1750-1), and to Admiral Jennings
at Barkway, Hertfordshire (after 1743).13
The marble bust by Rysbrack bears a close resemblance to the angel holding aside the
drapery that adorns the medallion high relief portrait of John Gay on his monument
by Rysbrack in Westminster Abbey, and to one of the angels on the monument to
Harriot Bouverie as well as to the boy on the viewers right side of the relief on the
fireplace in the Foundling Museum; and both the angels or putti on the monument to
Admiral Jennings clearly relate to the marble bust of the boy by Rysbrack in Fig. 1,
while the body types of those figures clearly correspond with the torso of Rysbrack’s
marble boy.

There are also many similarities between the marble bust in Fig. 1 and Rysbrack’s
marble portrait bust (Fig. 2) of Henry Frederick Harley, infant heir to the vast
combined London fortunes of his parents, the Earl and Countess of Oxford. Henry
died aged only four days in October 1725. His life-size bust, described by Eustace as
‘in memoriam, unique of its kind, may have been commissioned soon after the baby’s
death’ in 1725.14
The style of carving and surface finish of the marble bust of the boy (Fig. 1) are seen
on numerous busts by Rysbrack, and the specific shape of the torso and its truncation
(Fig. 3) as well as the truncation of the shoulders, with their concave curves, is
idiosyncratic of Rysbrack’s oeuvre, and can be seen on almost all of Rysbrack’s
portrait busts of males, including those recorded in the article and other such as
Alexander Pope, 1730 (National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 5854), John Barnard
1744 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Acc. No. 1976.330), and Francis
Smith of Warwick, c. 1741 (Private Collection).

In 1964, Margaret Whinney commented that ‘the form of’ Rysbrack’s bust of Daniel
Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham, c.1723 (Victoria and Albert Museum, Mus. No. A.
6-1999), which is also seen in the Orkney bust, ‘with its long concave curves below
the arms, is not derived from Antiquity, and may be an echo of the long form still
being used for busts in Rysbrack’s youth by his master, Vervoort.’15. Like those busts,
the back of the bust of the boy has the same distinctive and meticulously finished,
open, curved back. Rysbrack’s bust of Francis Smith of Warwick has the deeply
concave back associated with all Rysbrack’s marble busts, and a central support of
circular profile, obviously designed to be fixed to the circular socle on which it rests,
with an upper half-round moulding to the central circular support and a straight-sided
moulding at the base, almost identical with the back and support of the marble bust of
the boy in Figs. 1 and 3.16 The marble bust of the boy also rests on a socle of a type
unique in the eighteenth century to Rysbrack’s busts and which is, for example, seen
supporting his celebrated portrait bust of the 1st Earl of Orkney, 1733 (Fig. 4),17 and
on his historicising busts of Shakespeare (1760), Rubens (c. 1743), van Dyck (c.
1760), and Il Fiamingo (1743-6), amongst others.18