DIDIER AARON Paintings × Drawings × Sculpture

FÉLICIE DE FAUVEAU (Livorno 1799 – 1886 Florence)

Portrait of Anne Lindsay (1803-94)

High-relief white marble on a Turquin bleu marble plinth

Signed on the left of the model: F. de Fauveau.

H: 40 cm (15 ¾ "); W: 24.5 cm (9 ½ "); D: 8 cm (3 ¼ ")

c.1840

Shown in an architectural framework of pointed arches, this smaller-than-life-size portrait of Anne Lindsay carefully sculpted in immaculate marble, is a perfect example of the singular art of Félicie de Fauveau. Inspired by the Middle Ages, Dante and Walter Scott, her work - as rare as it is personal - was brilliantly showcased in the recent exhibition devoted to her at the Musée d’Orsay in 2013. This sculpture introduces us to the lives of the pioneer sculptress and the families of Sir James (1793-1855) and Anne Lindsay (née Trotter) of Balcarres, Fife, and Lord Lindsay (1812-80), a cousin, who became 25th Earl of Crawford and 8th Earl of Balcarres in 1869. It was through the support and guidance of Anne Lindsay and Félicie de Fauveau, that Lord Lindsay conducted his art historical studies in Italy, evidenced in the surviving correspondence between the two. In 1846 Lord Lindsay married Sir James and Anne’s eldest daughter Margaret and in the following year published the seminal Sketches of the History of Christian Art, the first serious study of the subject in the English language.

Fauveau first met the Lindsays in 1839-40 when she made this bust.1 In winter, the Lindsays rented the Palazzo Villino Torrigiani in Florence, a short distance from Fauveau’s studio in a former convent on the Via dei Serragli. A fervent royalist, Fauveau had a profound influence on the family’s artistic taste, encouraging Anne Lindsay to look at Masaccio’s frescoes in the church of the Carmine and persuading the couple to revisit Siena. A deep friendship developed between the two women and Anne ensured that the artist received commissions from Lord Lindsay for his estate, Dunecht House in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. There, Félicie de Fauveau executed several mantelpieces and part of a fountain. She also executed Lord Lindsay’s tomb for the chapel at Dunecht.

In his journal entry on 1 June 1840 in Pisa, Lord Lindsay wrote: ‘James and Anne wish me to write a short paper or pamphlet about the old masters in order to induce the appreciation of them into England. […] Anne told me that Mlle de Fauveau had several times expressed to her a wish that I should do this. Nous verrons.’ On 10 December 1840 he wrote to Anne, agreeing to it, and suggesting that her son Sir Lindsay Coutts (1824- 1913), artist and later founder of the Grosvenor Gallery, London, should become his ‘disciple’ to set an example to artists to follow his views of ‘striving to revive the spirit of the past and restore the Arts to pristine dignity and artists to a sense of their due vocation.’ The two went on a ground-breaking tour of Italy in 1841-42 which is recorded in his carefully thought-out letters to Anne Lindsay. His Sketches of the History of Christian Art is dedicated to Sir Lindsay Coutts.

‘I have become so absolute that even those I like weigh on me,’ wrote on 9 November 1845 Félicie de Fauveau to Anne Lindsay. In just a few words, Félicie de Fauveau defined her imperious nature, drawn with even more exactitude by Luc Benoit who wrote: ‘She was born in Florence, where her father was a banker, to one of the oldest families of Brittany, in whom the robust temperament of feudal times lived on: contempt for others, pride in old-fashioned virtues, fierce independence, and devotion - unhesitatingly aggressive - to throne and altar.’ Having studied under Louis Hersent (1777-1860) and Bernard Gaillot (1780-1847), Félicie de Fauveau was friends with Ingres and Paul Delaroche, met Ary Scheffer, and attracted the attention of Stendhal, Alexandre Dumas and Théophile Gautier, who all noticed the bas-relief that she exhibited at the Salon of 1827, Queen Christina of Sweden Refusing to Pardon Monaldeschi. Profoundly attached to the Legitimist cause, the artist joined the ‘great uprising’ led by the Duchesse de Berry, before fleeing to Belgium, then continuing as far as Rome, and finally Florence where she settled with her mother and her brother Hippolyte, who helped her with her work.

Fauveau rebelled against the generation preceding her, rejecting the art of Antiquity and of Canova that was taken as a model by her Florentine contemporary Bartolini. She added her own vision and all of her political and spiritual commitment to her work. She conceived the portrait in the medieval manner, including attributes and signs to reveal the identity of her models. ‘We want above all for the architecture and the portrait to present a whole that satisfies the demands of the times in which we live and the taste of our ancestors of the 15th century…’ wrote Hippolyte de Fauveau to the Marquis des Issarts on 3 October 1839. This innovative concept of the portrait can be fully seen in that of the Marquis Forbin des Issarts (1839) or that of Henri d’Artois, Comte de Chambord (1840).

Framed like a Madonna by a symbolic mandorla, this delicate portrait of Anne Lindsay, treated like a sculpted jewel and as smooth as bronze, with the family coat of arms in low-relief, is as much evidence of a long, deep friendship, as it is of the powerful, symbolic art of Félicie de Fauveau.

LITERATURE : ‘Mademoiselle Félicie de Fauveau’, l’Artiste, Paris, 1842, pp. 6-9. Luc Benoist, La sculpture romantique, Paris, (undated), pp. 88-96. Silvia Mascalchi, Félicie de Fauveau, Una scultrice romantica da Parigi a Firenze, Fireze, 2012. For the letters from Lord Lindsay to Anne Lindsay: Hugh Brigstocke, ‘Lord Lindsay: Travel in Italy and Northern Europe, 1841-42, for Sketches of the History of Christian Art’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, Vol. 65 (2003), pp. 161-258.

______1 Hugh Brigstocke, ‘Lord Lindsay: Travel in Italy and Northern Europe, 1841-42, for Sketches of the History of Christian Art’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, Vol. 65 (2003), p. 166.

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