François Dieussart

François Dieussart (also Frans; Armentières, c. 1600 – London, 1661) was a Walloon sculptor who worked for court patrons in England, the Dutch Republic and northern Europe, producing portrait busts in the Italianate manner.[1]

Bust of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia. Marble, circa 1641 CE. By Francois Dieussart. From the Dutch Republic, Now the Netherlands. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London
François Dieussart
Bornc. 1600
Died1661
Known forSculpture
StyleItalian Baroque sculpture
Patron(s)Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel, Christian IV of Denmark, Frederick III of Denmark, Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria
Bust of Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange in Sanssouci.
Dieussart's bust of Frederick III of Denmark.

Life and Work

Dieussart was likely an active sculptor by the time he arrived in Rome in his early twenties. He appears in an entry from 1622 at the charitable organisation run at the Church of St. Julian of the Flemings and had become its director by 1630. He was invited to England by the Earl of Arundel in 1636, and made a reputation there with the construction of a magnificent mechanical monstrance forty feet (12.2 metres) high for Queen Henrietta Maria's chapel at Somerset House.[2]

His bust of Charles I of England, probably commissioned by Arundel, is at Arundel Castle,[3] Another portrait bust of Charles I in Windsor Castle, possibly by Thomas Adye or Francis Bird (c. 1737–44) is speculatively thought to be based on a now lost bust by Dieussart.[4]

He is mentioned in a poem by Cornelis de Bie in his book Het Gulden Cabinet as being court sculptor for the Stuarts in England.[5] A brief biographical sketch for Dieussart was published in the early art dictionary Teutsche Academie by Joachim von Sandrart.[6] According to the RKD he learned his trade in Rome from François Duquesnoy.[7]

Literature
  • Frits Scholten, François Dieussart, Constantijn Huygens, and the Classical Ideal in Funerary Sculpture, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 25, No. 4. (1997), pp. 303–328.
  • Ulrich Thieme, ed. (1914), "Dusart (Dieussart), François", Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (in German), vol. 10, Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, p. 225

Notes and References
  1. Charles Avery, "François Dieussart (c. 1600–1661 portrait sculptor to the courts of northern Europe", Victoria and Albert Museum Yearbook 4 1974:63-99 brings together Dieussart's work.
  2. Avery 1974:65 and Edward Chaney, 'Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel by Francois Dieussart', Apollo, cxliv, no 413 (August 1996), pp. 49-50.
  3. Michael Vickers, "Rupert of the Rhine: a new portrait by Dieussart and Bernini's Charles I" Apollo 107 (1978:161-69).
  4. Gudrun Raatschen, Plaster Casts of Bernini's Bust of Charles I, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 138, No. 1125. (December 1996), pp. 813-816; 813
  5. Het Gulden Cabinet p 556
  6. Joachim von Sandrart (1675), "Franciscus du Sart", L'Academia Todesca. della Architectura, Scultura & Pittura: Oder Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau- Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste (in German), vol. 3, Nuremberg, p. 350, retrieved 29 June 2019
  7. François Dieussart in the RKD.


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