European Sculpture and Works of Art
European Sculpture and Works of Art
Property of a Distinguished British Private Collector
Bust of Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, Duchesse d'Angoulême (1778-1850)
Lot Closed
July 4, 12:15 PM GMT
Estimate
10,000 - 15,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Attributed to Théophile-François-Marcel Bra
1797 - Douai 1863
French, circa 1827
Bust of Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, Duchesse d'Angoulême (1778-1850)
white marble, on a white marble socle
bust: 65cm., 25 1/2 in.
socle: 14cm., 5 1/2 in.
Private collection, London
Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Angoulême, was the daughter of King Louis XVI of France and Queen Marie-Antoinette; she was their only child to survive the French revolution.
Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte was born at Versailles on 19 December 1778 and named after her maternal grandmother, the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. From August 1792 she was imprisoned with her family in the Tour du Temple, only learning of the deaths of her mother and brother in August 1795. She finally left France in a prisoner exchange on 18 December 1795, the day before her seventeenth birthday. Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte spent the first part of her exile in Vienna with her mother’s family. She married her first cousin Louis-Antoine, Duc d'Angoulême, son of the Comte d'Artois at Mittau in Courland, residence of their uncle, the exiled Louis XVIII. They later moved to England, where she resided with her husband and her uncle at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire. With the Restoration in 1814 she returned to France. On the death of Louis XVIII in 1824, her father-in-law became Charles X, and her husband therefore Dauphin of France. Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte is the only Dauphine to have been the daughter of a French king. As Dauphine she was respected for her charitable works, which included her role as protector of the Infirmerie Marie Thérèse, an institution set-up to provide shelter to priests and noblewomen who had been impoverished by the revolution. In Paris between Empires 1814-1852, Philip Mansel has highlighted how that, 'from the Dauphine down, many women from the élite spent much of their time visiting and helping the poor. Some employed priests to distribute their charities, others themselves climbed staircases to the worst attics in the poorest districts' (op. cit., p. 214). With the abdication of Charles X in July 1830, Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, eventually became king and Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte was once again sent into exile. She died in Austria in 1851. She had no children.
According to Lami, six sculpted portraits of Marie-Thérèse, Duchesse d'Angoulême were exhibited at the Paris Salon within her lifetime: a terracotta or plaster bust by Denis Foyatier (now in Lyon); a medal by Raymond Gayrard in 1814; a bust by Bernard Griffoul-Dorval (Toulouse 1788-1861) in 1815 (this appears to be his first recorded publicly exhibited sculpture); a bust by Louis-Alexandre Romagnési (Orleans 1776-1852 Paris) in 1817; a further marble bust by by Achille-Joseph-Étienne Valois in 1817 (this is now at Versailles where it has been since 1843); and, finally, a medallion by JF Walcher in 1815.
The present bust appears to be an unrecorded portrait of the sitter at a more advanced age. Characteristically, she wears the ostrich feathers in her hair as in her post-Restoration painted portrait by Antoine-Jean Gros (1816) at Versailles (inv. no. MV6372). Given the sitter's mature features it is likely that the present bust was carved when she was Dauphine of France in the 1820s, prior to her exile in 1830. The present bust may be contemporary to Alexandre-François Caminade's 1827 portrait of the sitter, which is also at Versailles (inv. no. MV4797).
A plausible candidate to be sculptor of the bust is Théophile-François-Marcel Bra (1797-1863) who executed a monumental statue of her husband in 1827 (the sculpture was initially installed in the Galerie d'Angoulême in the Louvre and was subsequently moved to Versailles, where it remains: inv. no. MV 1362). The lace, formed of small drill holes, is similar to Bra's Bust of Charles X in the Louvre (inv. no. CC169). The stylistic affinity shared between the present bust and others recorded by Bra (including the aforementioned Charles X and a number of portraits at the musée de la Chartreuse, Douai) justify a tentative attribution to the sculptor.
RELATED LITERATURE
S. Lami, Dictionnaire Des Sculpteurs De L'École Française Du Moyen Age Au Règne De Louis XIV, Paris, 1898; S. Hoog (ed.), Musée national du château de Versailles: Les sculptures I - Le musée, Paris, 1993, pp. 36, 94, nos. 38, 338; P. Mansel, Paris between Empires 1814-1852, London
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