Portrait of King Charles I
Bust of Charles I

In the 18th century, sculpted portraits of great men in history, called ‘worthies’, were fashionable among the British elite. Busts of King Charles I were less common than other figures. A splendid marble portrait of the King was made by the French-born sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac. He ran a successful practice and was admired for his lifelike portraits. This bust, with its simplified drapery and shallow three-dimensionality, seems to have been produced in his workshop as a less costly version, or multiple, of the more finely detailed marble work.
This bust representing King Charles I (1625-49) is based on a marble portrait by the Italian Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which had been destroyed by a fire at Whitehall Palace in 1698. Bernini’s lost royal portrait was known through casts and copies and thereafter became the major reference for a large number of sculpted portraits of the King for decades, if not centuries, after his death. The sculptor of this bust would have based his much later interpretation on a cast of the Bernini bust.

Lee Bequest 1947