Roubiliac and Hogarth: representations of temporality and eternity

Plates

English painting of the eighteenth century may still not be fully appreciated, but its theories, aims, and practices have been clarified in monographs on its major practitioners. Study of the sculptors, however, has not gone far beyond the monographs of K. A. Esdaile on Roubiliac (1928) and M. I. Webb on Rysbrack (1954), and, in overviews, Margaret Whinney’s Pelican volume of 1964 and Joseph Burke’s chapters in his Oxford English Art 1714–1800 (1976). Part of the problem is that most sculptures were portraits, and portraits are not as easy to deal with as subject or history paintings. The Reformation had virtually eliminated devotional sculpture or painting as idolatrous, and the ideology of the Whig revolution of 1688 had replaced celebrations of an omnipotent monarch with portraits of aristocrats as Roman senators.

The first serious attempt to deal with Louis François Roubiliac since Esdaile’s book is this hefty monograph by David Bindman and Malcolm Baker on Roubiliac’s funerary sculpture. The reproductions are extraordinarily generous and satisfying; the color plates, covering the whole sequence of major funerary monuments, succeed in bringing out the colors of the various materials Roubiliac employed that look uniformly gray in the dim light of the church. The book is divided into three parts: Bindman’s general account of the life, market, and iconography of the monuments dominates; Baker’s description of the shop procedures by which the monuments were planned and constructed and his catalogue of all Roubiliac’s monumental sculptures follow as supporting documents. (A separate catalogue of the portrait sculptures by Baker is to follow.)

For art historians like Bindman and Baker, who practice the “new art history” that features the impact of social and political settings on artists, the sculptor of funerary monuments would seem the ideal subject. The interplay of the wishes of the deceased, the mourners, the commissioners, and the church itself limits the artist’s agency. Bindman and Baker set out to show how narrowly determined the sculptures were—in Bindman’s chapters by the social and literary assumptions and by the patrons’ programs; in Baker’s by the mechanics of producing such complex structures and by the procedures and materials of their execution. As the authors acknowledge, they would prefer to follow the historians “who have in recent years moved out from political and intellectual history towards social and cultural issues,” “most of which are outside the artist’s control.” The close scrutiny of internal and external evidence is the procedure they follow, but Roubiliac’s career, devoted to exceeding the limits of his medium, the rules, and the pressures of patronage, forces them (reluctantly) to “emphasise the artist’s creativity at the expense of other aspects” (p. ix).

Bindman subordinates the meager materials of Roubiliac’s biography to the enumeration of these “other aspects.” Aside from the question of Roubiliac’s baptism (was he born Roman Catholic or Huguenot?) and whether, before his move to London, he had worked outside France, much of this is perfunctory. For the date of Roubiliac’s death, for example, Bindman simply cites Esdaile. In fact, it is of some significance for understanding Roubiliac’s position in his last months that his funeral was announced in The St. James’s Chronicle of 14–16 January 1762; this journal, run by Garrick, Bonnell Thornton, George Colman, and others closely connected with Hogarth, had earlier (as Bindman does notice) published his French poem attacking connoisseurs with an English translation. Roubiliac’s monuments fit into and helped shape the argument being carried out in the 1750s by the St. Martin’s Lane artists as to the proper direction of English art, whether independently (out of native roots) or as a copy of the French (continental) model of a state academy; whether toward indigenous particularity or toward classical generality.

The Military Monuments

The data surrounding these monuments force Bindman to settle not so much on large social...