Félicie de Fauveau, 1799 - 1886

Commissioned by Mme de Jumilhac ; French private collection, since the 1950s.

Félicie de Fauveau. L'Amazone de la sculpture, Historial de Vendée, Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne et musée d'Orsay, Paris, 2013, n° 19.

A. Dufour, V. Berri (dir.), Félicie de Fauveau. L'Amazone de la sculpture, cat. exp. musée d'Orsay, Paris, 2013, p. 325, n° 19.

The bust is in very good condition overall, with some natural inclusions and a few yellow stains to the marble at several places. The bust is set on its original polychrome marble base.
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Student of the painter Louis Hersent then Bernard Gaillot, Félicie was a self-taught sculptor. Close to Ary Scheffer and Paul Delaroche, she frequented in Paris the Romantic avant-garde and was deeply influenced by the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In 1827, she exhibited at the Salon her relief of Christina of Sweden Refusing to Spare the Life of Her Equerry Monaldeschi (Louviers, municipal museum). Stendhal recognized in Félicie a great artist : "All this is natural, beautiful, full of fire, and leaves no room for jesting" (A. Dufour, V. Berri, op. cit.). In 1829, she received a pension from Charles X, but her uncompromising legitimist convictions ended her Parisian career when she opposed the July Monarchy and participated in the Vendée rebellion in 1832. Close to the Duchess du Berry, mother of the young pretender to the throne, the Duke of Bordeaux, Félicie waged a common struggle with her intimate confidant, the Countess de Rochejaquelein, which earned her imprisonment and an exile to Florence in 1833. She was welcomed by the sculptor Lorenzo Bartolin and then opened her own studio with the help of her brother, Hippolyte. She found in this cradle of the Renaissance an environment conducive to her art.
Félicie only executed around fifteen portraits, often embedded in an architectural construction in the form of a pediment with pinnacles, a three-lobed shell such as ours, or rolled leather work. The association of sculpture and architecture is a recurrent concept in Félicie's work. Like all her models, Louise-Joséphine de Rohan-Chabot came from the monarchist society to which Félicie remained attached throughout her life.

RELATED LITERATURE
S. Lami, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l'école française au XIXe siècle, Paris, 1916 (rééd. 1970), p. 348.
D. M., « Mademoiselle Félicie de Fauveau. Sculpteur. Florence », dans L'Artiste, 1842, t. I, p. 86 ; J. Barbotte, "Félice de Fauveau, héroïne vendéenne et sculpteur romantique", mémoire de l'Ecole du Louvre, Paris, 1971, p. 36bis.