LONDON.- Stuart Lochhead Sculpture has been a stand out exhibitor at recent editions of TEFAF Maastricht with incredible objects selling to world-class museums. Now the London-based sculpture dealer has once again announced its participation in the fair’s 2024 edition with a special, one-room exhibition dedicated to nineteenth-century polychrome sculpture.

A Room Full of Colour will celebrate the mingling of techniques, styles and expertise, as well as the inventiveness of artists who worked at the intersection between fine and decorative arts in the nineteenth century. The display will include sculptures in terracotta, plaster and glazed ceramic by the likes of Prosper d’Epinay (1836-1914), Albert Carriés (1855-1894) and Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929).

The gallery will also present a rediscovered masterpiece by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827- 1875): an original plaster petit modéle of the famed composition Why Born Enslaved!, one of only two casts produced during the artist’s lifetime. The sculpture was conceived as part of the Fountain of the Four Continents in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris and was exhibited as a free- standing work of art at the Paris Salon of 1869. The model has often been described as a nineteenth-century abolitionist manifesto. This and other possible interpretations of this rich work of art have been explored in a hugely important, year-long monographic exhibition organised at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022.

Another highlight of Stuart Lochhead Sculpture’s stand will be a monumental marble Bust of the Hope Roma by Vincenzo Pacetti (1746-1820). Long considered lost, it was rediscovered only in 2016. The bust was created after an antique original in the Borghese collection (now at the Louvre) and acquired in Rome by the celebrated collector and connoisseur Thomas Hope (1769- 1831). Hope brought the monumental sculpture to London, where he exhibited in his Sculpture Gallery at 10 Duchess Street—one of the first ever art galleries open to the public in Europe. It was exhibited at The Deepdene, the patron’s mansion in Surrey, until 1884.

The gallery has always seen notable successes in Maastricht: in 2020, a bust by François
Girardon, Louis XIV’s court sculptor, was acquired by the Château de Versailles; and in 2022, a unique French Renaissance sculpture of the Madonna and Child was sold to the Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas). The 2023 edition saw four museum sales, including a rare terracotta relief by Massimiliano Soldani to the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts and the Mask with the Head of Medusa by Arnold Böcklin to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Connecticut).