Andréa SOLDI (1703 - 1771) - Lot 39

Andréa SOLDI (1703 - 1771) Portrait du sculpteur Roubillac (1702-1762) Oil on canvas 77 x 66 cm. In our painting, Andréa Soldi takes up the composition of his portrait of the famous sculptor Louis François Roubillac conserved at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, signed and dated 1751 (canvas 97.5 x 82.5 cm). There are several differences, notably in the colour of the Brandenburg jacket and that of the fur hat. The main variation concerns the terracotta on the stand to the left: in the Dulwich version, it is a sketch of Charity for the tomb of John Montagu, second Duke of Montagu, and in ours, an academic study of a man, his arms folded on his chest. Another replica is at the Garrick Club in London, where Roubillac worked on the bust of the actor David Garrick. Born in Florence, Soldi travelled through the Ottoman Empire in the 1730s. In Aleppo and especially in Constantinople, he made portraits of English merchants of the Levant Company in oriental costumes. He enjoyed great success upon his arrival in London in 1735, his style contrasting with the tradition of Vandyckian portraits or those of John Vanderbank who held the market for portraits of the aristocracy. After 1740, he took members of the English bourgeoisie as models. The portrait of an artist by one of his colleagues, and in this case the portrait of a sculptor at work by a painter, which was relatively frequent in Italy and France (as evidenced by the numerous "reception pieces" of the Royal Academy, for example), developed in turn in England in the 1730s-1740s with the numerous portraits of Roubillac and his competitor John Michael Rysbrack. We would like to thank Professor Malcolm Baker of the University of California, Riverside, for pointing out to us the existence of two sculpted academies in Roubillac's posthumous sale catalogue of 1762 that could potentially correspond to the one in our painting.