Portrait bust of Pierre-Louis-Marie Maloët: M.1-1979

Titles

Portrait bust of Pierre-Louis-Marie Maloët

Maker(s)

Sculptor: Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste

Entities

• Bust

Categories

• Sculpture

Description

Bronze, cast with considerable chasing and additional texturing; original marble socle.

Notes

History note: Baron Pichon, Paris; M. Lowengard, Paris; M. Gilles, Paris; Docteur Georges Tuffier to 1973; Paris, Ader, Picard & Tajan 29 November 1973; Mme Dillée; Artemis Fine Arts (David Carritt, Ltd, London) to 1979.

Legal notes

Bought with the Gow Fund with Grant-in-Aid from the Victoria and Albert Museum and a contribution from the National Art-Collections Fund, 1979

Acquisition and important dates

Method of acquisition: Bought (1979) by National Art Collections Fund

Dating

18th Century, Late
Louis XVI
Circa 1775 CE - 1785 CE

Note

Maloët was a distinguished French physician, who proved his worth during an epidemic of plague in Brest in 1758. He practiced and taught medicine in Paris, and, in 1773, was appointed inspector of the military hospi¬tals, conseiller du roi, and physician to Louis XVI’s daughters, the princesses Adelaide and Victoire. In 1791 he followed them into exile in Rome, and as an emigrée forfeited his possessions. After the establishment of the Empire he became one of the four doctors who served Napoléon. Pigalle trained in the workshops of Robert Le Lorrain and Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne, and in 1736 went to Rome where he studied for five years. He returned to Paris in 1741 and became an Academician in 1744. Pigalle’s most famous work of the 1740s is a marble of Mercury fastening his sandal, now in the Louvre. He executed about twenty-five busts, including one of Madame de Pompadour (1751). This portrait of Dr Maloët illustrates the informal and direct manner in which Pigalle represented his bourgeois sitters.

School or Style

Louis XVI