Portrait bust of Frederick Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, later 4th Marquess of Londonderry (1805-1872)
Paul Flosi (fl.1831 - 1850)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1835 - 1845
Materials
Plaster
Measurements
590 x 330 mm
Place of origin
Paris
Order this imageCollection
Mount Stewart, County Down
NT 1221058
Summary
Sculpture, plaster; Portrait bust of Frederick Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, later 4th Marquess of Londonderry (1805-1872); attributed to Paul Flosi (fl. 1831-50); c. 1835-50. A plaster portrait bust in herm form depicting Viscount Castlereagh, who would succeed as 4th Marquess of Londonderry in 1854. The bust is a larger version of a small bronze bust of the 4th Marquess, signed by the French sculptor Paul Flosi.
Full description
A portrait bust in plaster depicting Frederick Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, later 4th Marquess of Londonderry (1805-1872), looking ahead and slightly to his right, with luxuriant hair about his face, and sporting a prominent saucer or trencher beard. The bust is in herm form. A patinated surface applied to the plaster has been damaged towards the bottom, especially on the right-hand side of the herm, and along the lower edge at the front, largely destroying the inscription identifying the subject. Frederick William Robert Stewart was the only son of Charles, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, by his first wife, Lady Catherine Bligh, who died in 1812. After his mother’s death he was brought up in the household of his uncle Castlereagh, on the latter’s death in 1822 himself succeeding to the courtesy title of Viscount Castlereagh. On the death of his father in 1854, Frederick succeeded as 4th Marquess. The 4th Marquess briefly held a couple of minor political posts, but as a young man was better known as a somewhat dissipated society figure, nicknamed by his friends ‘Young Rapid’. A member of the social and literary circle of Lady Blessington and her companion the Count d’Orsay, Frederick almost certainly acquired the series of caricature sculptures by Dantan jeune (Jean-Pierre Dantan, 1800-1869) now at Mount Stewart (NT 1221043-1221049), which include a caraicature of d'Orsay. In 1842 he embarked on a tour of Egypt, in the course of which he nearly lost his life. In 1846 he married the widowed Lady Elizabeth Jocelyn, Viscountess Powerscourt. During the early years of their marriage, the couple spent much of their time at Lady Castlereagh’s former home Powerscourt, Co. Wicklow, but after succeeding the title in 1854, he made substantial repairs to Mount Stewart. The 4th Marquess’s final years were ruined by mental illness which worsened to the extent that he was eventually committed to an institution. The portrait shows Lord Castlereagh as a young man, sporting a prominent saucer or trencher beard of a type popular in Europe in the 1830s and 1840s. Similar beards may be seen in a number of Jean-Pierre Dantan’s portraits of men and women which the sculptor termed ‘serious portraits’ (‘portraits sérieux’) as opposed to his satirical ‘portraits chargés’, ‘loaded portraits’. Many of Dantan jeune’s serious portraits are also made in a very similar herm form, so the possibility this bust is also his work deserves consideration. There are a number of masks of unidentified male sitters among the collection of the sculptor’s studio models in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, some of which feature saucer beards and a reasonable resemblance to Lord Castlereagh (e.g. Sorel 1989, nos. 515 and 524). However the bust must in fact be the work of another Parisian sculptor, who was both a rival and a collaborator of Dantan, Paul Flosi (fl. 1831-1850). Very little is known about this Italian-born sculptor and modeller who during the 1830s and 1840s ran a gallery in the Passage Colbert on the rue Vivienne, near the old Bibliothèque Nationale. Flosi seems, rather like Dantan jeune, to have made something of a speciality of portraits of fashionable people, which would then be sold from his gallery, usually in the form of plaster casts, although he also cast some in bronze. There is an excellent small bronze bust of an unknown man at Mount Stewart (NT 1655830), whilst Flosi is known to have made in 1838 a larger (55 cms. high) bronze bust of the celebrated actor Pierre-Frédéric Achard (1808-56), later placed by his family in the family chapel in the Père-Lachaise cemetery (Henry Jouin, ‘La sculpture dans les cimitières de Paris’, Revue de l'art français ancien et moderne evue de l'art français ancien et moderne, 1897, pp. 97-348, p. 252). Another bronze bust by Flosi of the great French tenor Paul-Bernard Barroilhet (1810-71) was given by the singer’s daughter to the Paris Opera house in 1882 (Le progress artistique, 12 May 1882, p. 2). Flosi was probably dead by 1853, when the Galerie in the Passage Colbert was described as being run by his daughter (‘Le Pays. Journal des volontés de la France’, 25 July 1853). Another small bust in bronze signed by Flosi is identical on a smaller scale to the portrait in plaster, which must therefore be another hitherto unknown work by Flosi. The newly-discovered bronze bust is similar in conception and size to Flosi’s bust of an unknown man at Mount Stewart. It emerged at a local sale in Pontrilas on the Welsh border in Herefordshire (Nigel Ward & Co., 3 December 2022, lot 1186), so it is possible that it at some stage was in the Londonderry collections at Plas Machynlleth, the house in Machynlleth which became the main home for the 4th Marquess’s son and heir George Vane-Tempest, 5th Marquess (1821-1884) and his wife Mary Cornelia (1828-1906). Jeremy Warren June 2025
Provenance
On loan to the National Trust from Lady Mairi Bury (1921-2009), from 1976; accepted by HM Government in lieu of Inheritance Tax and allocated to the National Trust, 2013
Marks and inscriptions
On front of bust, fragmentary painted inscription:: …RICK. VISCOUNT CAS..ER……
Makers and roles
Paul Flosi (fl.1831 - 1850), sculptor possibly British (English) School, sculptor possibly French School, sculptor
References
Sorel 1989: Philippe Sorel, ‘Dantan jeune. Caricatures et portraits de la société romantique’, exh. cat., Maison de Balzac, Paris 1989.