33 JEAN-JACQUES CAFFIERI
French (Paris), 1725-1792
Bust of Alexis-]ean-Eustache
Taitbout, 1762
Terracotta
With plaster socle: 64.5 cm (25^3 /s in.)
Inscribed on the back: M. Taitbout,
ecuyer, chevalier de St. Lazare consul
de France a Naples, Fait parj.j. Caffieri
en 1762
96.SC.344Last and most celebrated member of a renowned family of artists, Jean-Jacques Caffieri
studied with his father, Jacques, and with Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne in Paris. He won the
prix de Rome in 1748 and, while in Italy, worked under the painters Jean-Francois de
Troy and Charles Natoire. In 1757, Caffieri exhibited religious and allegorical works
as well as portrait busts at the Paris Salon, and, two years later, he became a member
of the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.
Caffieri's fame was first established by the series of portraits he executed for the
Theatre Fran^ais, and throughout his career he produced numerous busts of celebrated
contemporaries. Reflecting the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment, Caffieri combined
naturalism and realism with psychological acuity in the rendering of his subjects, and
his Bust of Alexis-]ean-Eustache Taitboutis no exception. Caffieri has included such
apparently unflattering details as Taitbout's prominent nose, furrowed forehead,
bushy eyebrows, aging flesh, and blemishes, all of which contribute to the vitality
of the image. The sitter, whose Belgian family moved to Paris under the reign of
Henri IV, was a horseman, a knight of Saint-Lazare, and French general consul
to Naples. Caffieri's portrait appears to be an incisive and sensitive rendering of
a man whom the artist might have known personally from his trip to Naples in the
1750s. The informal nature of this bust suggests that the sculpture might have been
commissioned either by the sitter himself or by someone close to him. The work's
intimate character is underscored by showing Taitbout en neglige—in an unbuttoned
shirt open at the neck—and by the freshness of its modeling, the sense of realistic
detail, and its air of immediacy. PAF and PF94 EUROPEAN SCULPTURE