A Marble Portrait Head of the Empress Livia, Roman Imperial, Julio-Claudian, early 1st Century A.D.

her youthful face with delicate bow-shaped lips, slightly aquiline nose, and large wide-set rounded eyes under slightly arched brows, her finely carved hair bound in an invisible fillet, swept up into a fragmentary topknot, and tied three times into a braided chignon above the nape of the neck, comma-shaped locks escaping above the forehead, the base of the neck carved for insertion into a portrait statue; mounted at an oblique angle on a 19th Century green marble socle.

the sculptor Marie Bernières-Henraux, née Mouilleseaux de Bernières (b. circa 1880, d. circa 1965), Serravezza, Paris, and Château de Montferrier, Périgord
a gift to the current owner from the above in the early 1960s

Born in Tientsin in China into a cosmopolitan French aristocratic family, Marie Mouilleseaux de Bernières was married in the late 1890s to Bernard Sancholles-Henraux, a businessman with interests in several marble and other stone quarries in France and Italy, including Carrara, and the author of a handbook on marbles; the couple lived for a while in Serravezza, Tuscany, where their daughter Simone was born. As a sculptor Marie used a combination of her maiden and married names (Bernières-Henraux) to sign her works, two of which, a bronze head of Medusa cast in the lost wax technique, and a 1927 bronze portrait head of her second husband the diplomat G. Gaillard-Lacombe, are in the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, respectively inv. nos. RA 2012 and 2013. For the various Salons where she exhibited her work from 1906 to 1930 see Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, vol. 9, Munich/Leipzig, 1994, p. 604. Her voluminous address book, which is in the current owners’ possession, is not only a veritable who’s-who of 1920s Paris, full of names of Russian aristocrats in exile and of such illustrious names as Mme Paul Claudel’s, but also an important document for the inner workings of a Parisian sculptor workshop, listing models and suppliers for stone, clay, tools, as well as names of bronze foundries.