ROUBILIAC Louis François (1695-1762), an able French sculptor. Born at Lyons in 1695, he became a pupil of Balthasar of Dresden and of N. Coustou. About the year 1720 he settled in London, and soon became the most popular sculptor of the time in England, quite superseding the established success of the Flemish Rysbraeck.
He died on January 11,1762, and was buried in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Roubiliac was very largely employed for portrait statues and busts, and especially for sepulchral monuments in Westminster Abbey and elsewhere. His chief works in the abbey are the monuments of Handel, Admiral Warren, Marshal Wade, Mrs Nightingale, and the duke of Argyll, the last of these being the first work which established Roubiliac’s fame as a sculptor. The statues of George I., Sir Isaac Newton, and the duke of Somerset at Cambridge, and of George II. in Golden Square, London, were also his work, as well as many other important pieces of portrait sculpture. Trinity College, Cambridge, possesses a series of busts of distinguished members of the college by him....
Roubiliac possessed much skill in portraiture, and was technically a real master of his art, but unhappily he lived at a time when it had reached a very low ebb. His figures are uneasy, devoid of dignity and sculpturesque breadth, and his draperies are treated in a manner more suited to painting than sculpture. His excessive striving after dramatic effect takes away from that repose of attitude which is so necessary for a portrait in marble. His most celebrated work, the Nightingale monument, in the north transept of Westminster Abbey, a marvel of technical skill, is only saved from being ludicrous by its ghastly hideousness. On this the dying wife is represented as sinking in the arms of her husband, who in vain strives to ward off a dart which Death is aiming at her. The lower part of the monument, on which the two portrait figures stand, is shaped like a tomb, out of the opening door of which Death, as a half-veiled skeleton, is bursting forth. Wonderful patience and anatomical realism [are lavished on the marble bones of this hideous figure, and the whole of the grim conception is carried out with much skill, but in the worst possible taste. The statue of Handel in the south transept is well modelled, but the attitude is affected and the face void of any real expression. It is a striking proof of the degraded taste of the age that these painful works when first set up were enthusiastically admired.
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