A small portrait bust in terracotta depicts a youngish man, looking to his left, dressed informally in coat, waistcoat, shirt, and kerchief. He wears a tricorne hat over a wig, tied at back with a bow. The eyes are modeled with slight circles for the pupils. The bust is signed at back, in the damp clay before firing, “J.B. Lemoyne.” A sample of clay was taken from the bust for thermo-luminescence testing in 1985, but failed to provide a result.

The small bust is signed as the work of Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, a member of a dynasty of French sculptors active throughout much of the eighteenth century. Although Lemoyne was successful during his lifetime as a sculptor of royal and church monuments, such as the Monument to King Louis XV in Rennes,¹ most of these were destroyed at the French Revolution. As a consequence, Lemoyne is today largely known for his portrait busts, the genre in which nevertheless he was considered to excel by his contemporaries, as Denis Diderot implied in his comments on the Salon of 1765.² Around a hundred portrait busts by Lemoyne survive, individually and collectively providing a remarkable panorama of eighteenth-century French life.

The provenance of the bust was stated by Seligmann as the Burat collection. However, it does not feature in the sale of the collection of Mme Louis Burat held in Paris in June 1937,³ so presumably was sold privately at a later date. The bust was sold to Percy Straus as a portrait of François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire (1694–1778), one of the most celebrated writers and historians of eighteenth-century Europe. With its long straight nose, the image certainly bears some resemblance to Voltaire, so the bust may indeed have been conceived as an image of the celebrated philosophe. Nevertheless it is quite different in conception from Lemoyne’s portrait in marble of Voltaire, exhibited at the Salon of 1748 and known in a number of versions, not all of them made by Lemoyne himself.⁴

It is in fact doubtful that the Houston bust dates from the eighteenth century. It is more probable that it is a nineteenth-century pastiche, presumably intended to deceive, since it bears Lemoyne’s signature. The sitter’s dress, notably his tricorne hat, is more typical of nineteenth-century notions of eighteenth-century dress, and the very individual manner of modeling the eyes is also quite untypical of Lemoyne’s technique, as seen in autograph busts from his hand. There are no known authentic busts by Lemoyne on such a small scale.⁵

A terracotta bust of similar size and facture in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, is a reduced-size version of Lemoyne’s portrait of Voltaire (fig. 74.1).⁶ It is dated 1783 and bears the signature of Lemoyne’s pupil, the sculptor Jean-Jacques Caffiéri (1723–1792), who gave Lemoyne’s original full-sized plaster model to the Comédie-Française and also exhibited another full-sized version at the Salon in 1791 (no. 205). Though it is not inconceivable that Caffiéri marketed small copies of Lemoyne’s portrait in the years following the death of Voltaire in 1778, when his posthumous fame was at its height, it is thought more probable that the V&A bust too was made toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the fashion for eighteenth-century art meant there was an active market for terracotta, marble, and bronze sculptures purporting to date from the previous century.

—Jeremy Warren