After François Girardon (French, 1628-1715: An impressive late 19th century French equestrian bronze of Louis XIV on horseback

Footnotes

Provenance:
Private Spanish collection

The present lot is a bronze reduction of the monumental equestrian statue of Louis XVI that once stood in the Place Louis-le-Grand (now the Place Vendôme) but was destroyed in 1792 during the turmoil of the post revolution years.

Designed by the sculptor Francois Girardon, the statue which stood over seven metres high was conceived as the centrepiece to the square and was commissioned by Louis XIV's war minister the Marquis de Louvois in honour of the king and created by the architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart. Began in 1685, the square and the statue were themselves created to usurp the magnificence of the nearby Place des Victoires which had similarly been commissioned (in this case by the Duc de La Feuillade) in honour of the king and created in 1679, this time with an equestrian centrepiece of the King by the sculptor Martin Desjardins.

Girardon worked on the model from 1685 to 1687 and depicted Louis XIV as a Roman emperor in the manner of antique classical statues albeit wearing a contemporary voluminous long curling wig. The king with lofty and imperial stance sits astride his mount with no saddle and stirrups to show the mastery of his horsemanship and his saddlecloth is edged with fleurs-de-lis whilst his horse tramples the sword and shield of a defeated enemy. However, the production of the full-size bronze was initially found almost impossible to achieve as France did not poccess the mastery of the founders of the Italian Renaissance. A lost-wax cast was eventually created in 1692 by Balthazar Keller, a Swiss founder living in France and it was a technical tour de force requiring a gigantic, complex mould. The cast which took eighty thousand pounds of bronze, was a total success and unanimously admired but it was not set upon its pedestal until 1699.

Several contemporary reductions of the work were made, all mostly measuring around 100cm high, some of them on the initiative of Girardon but the majority were anonymous. However, the Louvre in Paris holds the only signed reduction cast by Girardon.