Stuart Lochhead Sculpture returns to Maastricht for the third year, following the great success of 2020, when the gallery sold a bust by the royal Baroque sculptor François Girardon to the Château de Versailles, and 2022, with the sale of an important French Renaissance sculpture of the Madonna and Child to the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.
This year, the gallery will dedicate a special display on the gallery stand at TEFAF Maastricht 2023 to ‘The Sculptor’s Materials’. Unlike oil painting, whose mastery has been shared by a wealth of artists for over six centuries, each of the sculptor’s materials is associated with
different aesthetic and intellectual values, is employed for a different purpose in the artist’s atelier, and requires diversified expertise. From modelling original ideas in malleable and fragile clay, to following the natural grain and tensile strength of wood, understanding the chemistry of bronze, and discovering the hidden qualities of marble.
Four masterpieces in wood, terracotta, marble and bronze will showcase the individual styles of four prominent Old Master sculptors working across Spain, Italy, and France, from the 16th to the 18th century. The work on display will include: an extremely rare model in terracotta of ‘Christ at the Column’ by the hand of Filippo Parodi (1630-1702), the greatest Baroque sculptor from Genoa.
Other highlights of the fair include a unique, monumental Bust of Eugène Delacroix by Albert- Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824-1887). The bust was created to celebrate Delacroix, the father of Romanticism and the greatest French painter of his generation. Félicie de Fauveau’s Bust of Henri d’Artois and Charlotte Besnard’s Germaine. The pair reflects on the work of women artists who have long been denied their place in the canon of art history. The Bust of Henri V (1840) is exemplary of her skill as a portrait artist, as well as of her broader interest in the figurative language of the Middle Ages. Charlotte Besnard’s sculpture Germaine, (1894)
represents the artist’s daughter, who is sensitively rendered in all its details and liveliness.
