John Michael Rysbrack R.A.
Antwerp 1694 – London 1770

Two Maenads, A Study
inscribed Michl Rysbrack Invent in brown ink and sculptor in pencil on the mount

brown wash with white highlights and brown ink on paper adhered to the mount

6 7/8 × 4 ¾ inches (175 × 120 mm.)

PROVENANCE:
Private Collection, New Jersey, circa 1960 until the present time

From his arrival in London in October 1720 ¹ Michael Rysbrack’s work and his patrons’ aspirations matched seamlessly. Margaret Whinney considers that ‘perhaps more than the work of any other artist [Rysbrack’s] reflects the taste of Augustan England…his importance in the history of English sculpture can hardly be sufficiently stressed.’ ²

The elegant line and assured draughtsmanship of this drawing are typical of Rysbrack’s execution and this ink and wash technique is familiar from sculptural designs such as Studies for a Statue of Inigo Jones (Victoria and Albert Museum) and his finished presentation drawings such as The Resurrection of Christ (City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery). The present example might belong to either category; the figures are clearly not intended to be executed in the round, but with its suggestion of a landscape background, the composition would translate well to a relief panel, just as the design has ease and spontaneity which Rysbrack demonstrates in drawings made for friends and collectors.

The classical subject is key to Rysbrack’s repertoire. In the 1720s the fascination which British patrons had begun to share in the Roman past, as a guide to correct taste in building and gardening, had begun to gather momentum. The great neo-Palladian architects and designers, Lord Burlington, Colen Campbell, William Kent and James Gibbs were among Rysbrack’s earliest and most loyal clients. Their works would be recognisable without Rysbrack’s ornamentation, but it is Rysbrack’s highly-wrought overdoors, friezes and chimneypieces which give the interior of their great houses such a distinctive accent and his statuary which peoples their gardens.

This drawing typifies the elements which delighted his new patrons. The subject, two of the female followers of Dionysus or Bacchus, shows familiarity with classical art and literature and lends the Augustan gentleman-statesman the aura of the Roman senator whose cultural heir he believed himself to be. The source may indeed be an ancient relief – it is comparable with a Bacchic plinth brought from Rome to Newby Hall in the 1760s – but if so it is likely to have been inspired by engravings or later sculptures after the original. Rysbrack’s classical vision echoed his patrons’ not least because like many of them he had not visited Rome himself, and his Romanizing sculptural style, influenced by his Flemish master Michael Van der Voort and the work of François Duquesnoy, is viewed through a prism of the Renaissance and the Baroque. ³The left-hand figure recalls the robust carving of ancient sculpture, but her companion alludes to contemporary Rococo lightness. This fluidity in which past and present, realism and monumentality, are effortlessly combined is Rysbrack’s signature, and it is apparent throughout his works from the Portrait Bust of Daniel Finch, Earl of Nottingham, early 1720s (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) which first made his reputation to the Hercules, 1744 (Stourhead) which reasserted his technical superiority when cheaper rivals such as Peter Scheemakers and Louis-François Roubiliac had begun to encroach on his practice. Rysbrack’s reputation remained second to none throughout his life. His devotees included Queen Caroline, Sir Robert Walpole, connoisseurs such as Henry Hoare at Stourhead or Lord Westmoreland at Mereworth and his fellow artists. When Rysbrack died in 1770 his epitaph might still have been the remarks published nearly forty years before that he ‘…wrought more for Reputation than for any other Recompense.’ ⁴

⁴ “The Notebooks of George Vertue V, “Walpole Society”, XVIII, 1929 – 1930, p.76.

⁴ Margaret Whinney, English Sculpture 1720-1830, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1971, p. 119.

⁴ J.D. Stewart, “New Light on Michael Rysbrack: Augustan England’s ‘Classical Baroque’ Sculptor”, The Burlington Magazine, 1978, vol. 120, no. 901, pp. 215-222.

⁴ Free Briton, August 16, 1733, quoted in Rupert Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660 – 1851, London, 1968, p.334.

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