About the Artwork
This life-size bust is a lively and informal characterization of Roubiliac's friend, the English architect Isaac Ware (ca. 1707–66). Ware's costume, especially the soft cap, loosely fitting jacket with frog closures, and the open linen shirt, is in the style worn by artists and virtuosi of the 1730s and 1740s. A French émigré trained in Dresden and Paris, Roubiliac executed a series of marble and terracotta busts of eminent artists and scholars in London, including the painters William Hogarth and Francis Hayman, the composer George Frideric Handel, the poet and satirist Alexander Pope, and the scientist Sir Isaac Newton. The well-known architect Isaac Ware published The Complete Book of Architecture (1735) and a translation of Andrea Palladio's Renaissance treatise The Four Books of Architecture (1738), and was purveyor of His Majesty's Works from 1741, the approximate date of this portrait.
Bust of Isaac Ware
ca. 1741
Louis Francois Roubiliac
1702-1762
English
Unknown
Marble
Overall: 25 3/4 × 18 × 9 5/8 inches (65.4 × 45.7 × 24.4 cm) Mount (pedestal): 49 7/16 × 16 3/4 × 16 3/4 inches (125.6 × 42.5 × 42.5 cm)
Sculpture
European Sculpture and Dec Arts
Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund, Henry Ford II Fund, New Endowment Fund, with funds from A. Alfred Taubman
1987.75
This work is in the public domain.
Markings
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Provenance
Described in the 1773 inventory of Sir John Ingilby, Ripley Castle, Yorkshire
by descent to the family of Sir Thomas Ingilby, Ripley Castle, Yorkshire, until 1987.
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Provenance pageExhibition History
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The exhibition history of a number of objects in our collection only begins after their acquisition by the museum, and may reflect an incomplete record.
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Rococo Art and Design in Hogarth's England. Exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum. London, cat. no. E15.
Smith, John Thomas. Nollekens and His Times, vol II. London, 1828, pp. 207-8.
Historic Houses Association Exhibition. Sales cat., Sotheby's, London, 1983-4.
An Inventory Of Household Goods, Furniture, Implements . . . And Other Articles Late The Property Of Sir John Ingilby Of Ripley In The County Of York, 1773.
Esdaile, K.A. The Life and Works of Louis Francois Roubiliac. London, 1928, pp. 47, 108-9, 134, 187.
Ripley Castle, North Yorkshire. York, 1986, p. 16.
Bulletin of the DIA 64, nos 2/3 (1988): 4, fig. 3, (ill.).
Baker, M. "The Making of Portrait Busts in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: Roubiliac, Scheemakers and Trinity College, Dublin." The Burlington Magazine 137 (December 1985): 828.
Darr, A. P. "European sculpture and decorative arts acquired by the Detroit Institute of Arts 1978-87." The Burlington Magazine 130 (June 1988): pp. 497-8, fig. 108 (ill.).
Darr, A. P. "Virtuoso Carving: Three Eighteenth-Century British Portrait Sculptures by Le Marchand, Roubiliac, and Chaffers." Bulletin of the DIA 83, no. 1/4 (2009): 44-6.
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Credit Line for Reproduction
Louis Francois Roubiliac, Bust of Isaac Ware, ca. 1741, marble. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund, Henry Ford II Fund, et al., 1987.75.
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