Portrait of Louis XIV (1638-1715), King of France and Navarra (‘Sun King’)

Entry

In sculpture, rulers’ portraits reached an apogee with the arrival of the princely propaganda of the French king, Louis XIV. As the self-proclaimed ‘Sun King’, Louis laid out a systematic approach to mythologize and promote himself as the absolute monarch of Europe. The implementation of art as a political tactic centring on the glorification of his kingly rule was to become a model for the rest of Europe. In this ‘fabrication of Louis XIV’, as Peter Burke described this phenomenon, sculptural portraits of the king played an essential role. As early as 1662, the writer Chapelain addressed a letter to to Minister Colbert in which he explicitly cited the role of bronze and marble portrait busts as a symbolic means for conveying and disseminating the king’s glory: ‘Yet there are, Sir, other commendable ways to spread and uphold the glory of His Majesty ... as are the pyramids, columns, equestrian statues, colossi, triumphal arches, busts of marble and bronze [...]’.² These sculptural portraits were made by top French artists and often (re-)produced in relatively large quantities. During the French Revolution, however, a great number of these works were lost, with public monuments most dramatically affected. The present bronze bust is a classic example of Louis XIV’s image politics, made by the Dutch-born sculptor Martin van den Bogaert (1637-1694), known as Martin Desjardins in France. As one of the most renowned sculptors working at the royal court and supplying an impressive array of kingly (equestrian) portraits, he contributed greatly to the princely image of the Grand Monarque.

The attribution of the present model to Desjardins enjoys a broad consensus.³ Convincing parallels emerge when comparing the bronze bust to other documented portrayals of Louis XIV by the artist, including Desjardins’s marble statue of the king at Versailles, commissioned by the Duc de La Feuillade in 1679, the reduced bronze replicas of equestrian statues made for the cities of Lyon and Aix-en-Provence, and his reliefs destined for the non-extant monument on the Place des Victoires.⁴ All these examples display the same restrained classicism, an aspect never quite as emphatically present in works by other highly esteemed portraitists of the king, e.g. Warin, Girardon and Coysevox. Other commonalities include various distinctive stylistic details, including the rendering of the pupils with small spiral-like incisions or the treatment of the curls of the wig, but also recurring clothing motifs, such as the pleated hem of the chemise just visible above the cuirass’s neckline.⁵

The present bust differs from the majority of sculpted portraits of Louis XIV, due to its smaller scale – just under life-size – and informal character. The bronze therefore conveys an unusual intimacy, enhanced by the king’s all’antica attire: he wears an austere cuirass in Roman style versus the somewhat pompous state suit of armour. Half visible beneath his robes is the shining sun, a reference to Apollo and monarchical emblem of the Sun King. Two rows of lambrequins, engraved with fleur-de-lis, and a pleated sleeve can be seen at the onset of the arms. The king’s robes are held in place by a rosette-shaped clasp at the right shoulder and serve to partly mask the bust’s termination. With the exception of the back of the head, the bust’s reverse is open.

The sitter is portrayed with strong and sharp-edged features; he radiates self-confidence and is depicted with a somewhat haughty air. His face turns slightly to the right (heraldic left). The imposing cascade of stylized curls on his wig in folio is the only contemporary motif of his attire. The absence of the thin moustache, which Louis XIV shaved off for the last time around 1690,⁶ provides a terminus post quem for the making of the bust: in or shortly after 1690. The entire sculpture displays a high level of finishing and detailing, thus suggesting it was cast by Desjardins’s collaborator, Roger Schabol (1656-1727), the famed Flemish bronze founder responsible for casting the sculptor’s smaller works.

Martin Desjardins was born Martin van den Bogaert in the Northern Netherlandish city of Breda. His formation as master sculptor began in the Antwerp workshop of Pieter Verbruggen I (1615-1686). In the 1650s, ‘Van den Bogaert’ left the Netherlands and settled permanently in Paris, where he assumed the French version of his name. From the 1670s on, he belonged to the small core of court sculptors – among them François Girardon (1628-1715) – whom Louis XIV designated to carry out a wide range of sculptural projects in Paris and Versailles. Unlike the Baroque and pompous glorification embraced by sculptors Girardon and Coysevox, Desjardins favoured a more austere, refined and perhaps northern classicism, as exquisitely demonstrated by the Amsterdam bust.

Desjardins had two ateliers. The first was a big workshop on the rue Saint-Marc, reserved for the carving and casting of his larger-scale works and where the sculptor resided. The second, smaller workshop was located at the Louvre, then the king’s palace in Paris. Here Desjardins produced his small-scale bronzes (such as the present bust) in collaboration with the aforementioned Schabol, who would continue to make casts of the master’s models even after the latter’s death. It was Schabol who transposed the facial features of Elector Max Emanuel of Bavaria onto a bronze cast of Desjardins’s equestrian portrait of Louis XIV, which he also signed and dated in 1699 (Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum).⁷ After his father’s death, Jacques Desjardins also continued producing casts of his father’s models for a period of time.⁸

The 1694 estate inventory of Desjardins’s workshops lists various bronze and plaster models made for the execution of finished works in bronze sculptures. These objects illustrate beyond a doubt that the medium bronze played a fundamental role in the sculptor’s work.⁹ One entry in this inventory reads ‘a bust in bronze of the King for Monseigneur le Cardinal d’Estrées priced eight hundred livres’. A proposed association with the present bronze bust may be deemed tenable, given the probable dating of the bust. The sculpture’s valuation at 800 livres – then a considerable amount – reflects the high regard afforded Desjardins’s bronzes.

The slightly smaller format of the present bronze bust suggests it was not made for a highly formal setting but instead for a more intimate location, e.g. a private cabinet or chamber of the king himself or someone in his close retinue. Members of the aristocracy in the king’s circle quite commonly commissioned portraits of Louis XIV destined for personal use or display in a public space. One example is a marble statue by Desjardins, commissioned in 1679 by François d’Aubusson, Duc de La Feuillade, which shows the king dressed in the raiment of a Roman emperor (Musée du Château de Versailles). Although initially intended for the duke’s Château d’Oiron (Deux-Sèvres), two years later La Feuillade chose to have the statue erected in Paris, accompanied by an addition bronze slaves – four in number, likewise cast by Desjardins – mounted on the pedestal (Paris, Louvre). Only three years later, however, Desjardins was asked to replace his marble statue with a bronze statuary group of Victory crowning Louis XIV as the Gallic Hercules. In 1684, the public space encircling this new monument was wholly renovated based on a design by the architect Jules Hardouin Mansart: the present-day Place des Victoires.¹⁰ Desjardins’s bronze group was the largest sculpture and the most important monument erected in honour of a French monarch up to this time. Not only was the monument itself an immediate success, Desjardins cast the entire work in his own workshop. His prestige as a sculptor increased dramatically, resulting in numerous new commissions for grand-scale projects, including the two life-size equestrian statues of Louis XIV made for the cities of Aix-en-Provence (unexecuted model) and Lyon (destroyed during the French Revolution).

Two other versions executed in bronze are of the type exemplified by the Rijksmuseum portrait bust. The first is a bust in the collection of Versailles, a bronze virtually equal to the Amsterdam bust in terms of size, casting technique and finishing quality, differing only in the presence of the thin moustache.¹¹ The second bust – a somewhat smaller, substantially inferior work – surfaced on the Paris art market in 2010 and is most likely a nineteenth-century replica.¹² Hoog dates the Versailles bronze – a work once in the possession of the French crown and which entered the collection of Versailles before 1837 – circa 1685.¹³

Two eighteenth-century sales include a bronze portrait bust of Louis XIV that, in terms of their dimensions, show a reasonable agreement with the Versailles and Amsterdam bronzes. As such, they too may also be categorized in the same group of exceptional busts (i.e. smaller than life-size). The first bust measures approximately one foot high (= c. 33 cm), and appeared in the Cressent sale (Paris, 15 January 1749).¹⁴ The second bronze, measuring 14 thumbs high (= 37.8 cm) and resting on a marble socle 6 thumbs high (= 16.2 cm) – was featured at a sale in Douai on 21 July 1788.¹⁵
The height of this bust comes surprisingly close to that of the Amsterdam portrait.

The crowned C punched in the Amsterdam bronze indicates that this bust is certain to have been sold between 1745 and 1749, and therefore provides an important terminus ante quem for the year of its manufacture. The virtually identical bronze at Versailles, given the presence of the thin moustache, would have been cast shortly before 1690, with the Rijksmuseum bust subsequently cast shortly thereafter. For this later bronze, Desjardin used the same model but updated it with a very minor alteration: the omission of the moustache.

Frits Scholten, 2025