The Historical Gallery at Versailles contains portrait busts and statues by 146 different sculptors of France, commencing with Germain Pilon and Jean Goujon, who flourished in the middle of the 16th century.
From all these great collections our Portrait Gallery has been enriched, as the Catalogue will show.
As works of art the French portraits cannot be placed in the highest rank. The style, as in French works of ideal sculpture, is rather picturesque, than antique and severe; and few of the portraits are free from a certain affectation of attitude or assumed expression of countenance, for which it may readily be conceived, the artist, rather than the subject, is to blame. It is rare to find a French bust treated with the seriousness and intensity of the antique, or with the unaffected naturalness of the best busts of the English school: too many indeed verge upon the common and fatal error of portraiture—caricature.
We must, however, take these portraits as the characteristic works of the country to which they belong; all of them bear the stamp of truthfulness, if some should be found tainted with exaggeration. Many are models in the art of marble portraiture. Those of Madame Dubarry (No. 235), and Marie Antoinette (No. 310), are especially beautiful; that of Gaston de Foix (No. 258) is also a very noble portrait; and the bust of Thomas Corneille (No. 222), is one of the finest productions of the school. The heads are generally rather larger than life: and the visitor cannot fail to remark the exceeding care bestowed upon the wigs and elaborate embroidery of the time.
(The French Portraits commence immediately behind the Statue of Admiral Duquesne, in the Great Transept.)
ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS.
196. Jean Goujon. Sculptor.
[Born in Paris. Died there, 1572.]
Many of his works were destroyed in the French Revolution, but the Tribune of the “Salle des Cent Suisses,” in the Louvre, the “Diana of Poictiers,” and the “Fountain of the Innocents,” in Paris, are left to attest the artist’s superiority. At Malmaison, in France, is another statue by him of Diana, remarkable for the beauty of the pose, the suppleness of the limbs, and the extraordinary lightness of the drapery. The two caryatides in the Renaissance Court are examples of his style. Killed by a shot from an arquebuse during the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, and whilst he was at work on the decoration of the Louvre.