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The French-born Huguenot sculptor Luis François Roubiliac (1702-62) settled in London around 1730. Roubiliac "met with small encouragement at first," but his celebrated statue of George Frideric Handel for Vauxhall Gardens established his reputation as the foremost sculptor in the English rococo movement. Renowned for his vivid portrait busts and theatrical large-scale funerary monuments, Roubiliac eclipsed his contemporaries, and only his older rival Michael Rysbrack (see cat. 152) enjoyed such his public estimation. One of his best-known and most influential sitters, Lord Chesterfield, opined: "Roubiliac only was a statuary, the rest stone-cutters."
In this eloquent portrait drawing Roubiliac is depicted with his sculptor's calipers in hand, deep in contemplation or awaiting inspiration. The terra-cotta sculpture on which Roubiliac thoughtfully leans bears some resemblance to the head of the Britannia figure in the sculptor's 1753 monument to Admiral Sir Peter Warren in Westminster Abbey; it was also described as the head of Medusa by a nineteenth-century reviewer - an appropriate emblem for a portrait of a sculptor, whose occupation is to transform living features into stone.
The portrait has been attributed recently to François-Xavier Vispré, a fellow-Huguenot and close friend and neighbor of Roubiliac. Although stylistic comparison with known works by Vispré has not been conclusive, circumstantial detail makes the attribution seem very likely. Vispré exhibited a pastel of Roubiliac at the Society of Artists in London in 1760, and this may have been ca. 6. The exhibited portrait made a powerful impression on the reviewer of the Imperial Magazine, or Complete Monthly Intelligencer, whose enthralled account suggests at least affinities with the Center's drawing: 'the man himself alive, breathing and just going to speak; most admirable! and himself never in marble cut better."

Gillian Forrester

Wilcox, Forrester, O'Neil, Sloan. The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2001. pg. 21 cat. no. 6