A bronze bust of La Fayette after David d'Angers - 1830

After DAVID D’ANGERS (1788-1856)
A small bronze bust of marquis de La Fayette (1757-1834)
Reduction of the 1828 plaster bust by David d’Angers
Patinated bronze, Yellow Sienna Marble pedestal
Paris by 1830

Height of the buste : 17 cm / Total height : 36 cm


The marquis de La Fayette by David d'Angers

An emblematic figure of Franco-American friendship, Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, enlisted at the age of 19 in 1777 to support the American insurgents. As General Washington's aide-de-camp, he pleaded with Louis XVI to send a French expeditionary force (1780) and took part in the Battle of Yorktown (1781). Throughout his life, he maintained close ties with this country, the scene of his first glory. Several American towns were named Lafayette in his honour. In 1824, after being defeated in the elections, he took advantage of his relative inactivity to embark on a triumphal fourteen-month tour of the USA, which lasted until September 1825.

In 1827, with the influence of the liberal opposition to Charles X and that of La Fayette growing, a national subscription was opened to raise a bust of Washington and offer it to the American Congress on behalf of the French people. David d'Angers was commissioned to do this, and in 1828 he added a bust of Lafayette, also to be presented to Congress on behalf of ‘the young French republicans’; he wanted it to be placed next to the bust of Washington. From this portrait of La Fayette, the original plaster of which is kept at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Saumur, he produced two marbles in 1829. One was given to the American Congress , the other to La Fayette, who placed it in the Château de la Grange-Bléneau in Seine et Marne. Until 2010, it was kept by his descendants.

A bronze version of this bust was executed around 1830 by Charles Crozatier , as well as reductions, often presented on yellow Sienna marble pedestals, such as the one kept at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, dated 1832 , which is very similar to ours.

During the Three Glorious Years and the fall of the Bourbon government, La Fayette was elected head of the National Guard and eventually helped install the Duc d'Orléans on the throne as Louis Philippe I and proclaim the July Monarchy. He became one of the tutelary figures of the new regime.

La Fayette died in Paris on 14 May 1834. Châteaubriant, who had been his political opponent, devoted several pages to him in his memoirs d'Outre-Tombe, extracts from which are reproduced below:

‘In this year 1834, M. de La Fayette has just died. I would once have been unfair in speaking of him; I would have portrayed him as a kind of two-faced fool with two reputations; a hero on the other side of the Atlantic, a villain on this side. [...] His ovation in the United States singularly enhanced him: a people, rising to greet him, showered him with the glow of their gratitude. [...] In the new world, M. de La Fayette has contributed to the formation of a new society; in the old world, to the destruction of an old society: liberty calls upon him in Washington, anarchy in Paris. [...]’


DAVID D’ANGERS

Pierre-Jean David, known as David d'Angers, was one of the greatest French sculptors of the Romantic period. He entered the workshop of the sculptor Philippe Laurent Roland in 1808, won the First Prix de Rome in 1811 and lived in Rome until 1815. In Italy he met many artists at the Académie de France in Rome and was influenced by both antique sculpture and the work of Canova.

A respected and renowned artist, he had many of the leading figures in the history of the 19th century pose for him, and produced an immense gallery of portraits of the ‘great benefactors of humanity’, with more than a hundred bust portraits and seven hundred medallion portraits.