A Northern European marble bust of a crying child, late 18th century

The present bust was most likely paired with a bust of a laughing child.  Pairs of busts of crying and laughing children, showing the range of human emotion, were inspired by the enlightenment fascination with physiognamy of facial expression and probably derived from paired representations of the ancient philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus.  Northern artists such as Hendrick de Keyser and Jan Claudius de Cock produced such pairs of children, as did later sculptors working in England such as Louis-François Roubiliac.