Terracotta Bust Of The Empress Of Russia Maria Féodorovna After Boizot French Sculpture

BOIZOT Louis-Simon (1743-1809), after
Portrait of the Countess of the North, Grand Duchess Maria Féodorovna of Russia (1759-1828), carrying the large cord and the plaque of the Order of Saint Catherine
Terracotta bust, wrongly signed and dated on the back "Pajou / 1779".
She is dressed in a dress decorated with a knot between the breasts, wrapped in a large drape, her hair styled high with two curls in the neck is topped with roses, a wide ribbon and a sort of feather egret (missing).
Slight gaps and small cracks.
It rests on a square base in morello cherry.
XIXth century.
H. 26 cm.

History
Grand Duke Paul and his wife Marie Feodorovna paid incognito visits to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in 1782, under the transparent pseudonym of "Count and Countess of the North". On this occasion, Louis XVI placed an order with the Royal Manufacture of Sèvres and offered them a magnificent toilet service, preserved in Pavlosk, accompanied by a superb mirror executed by Boizot, as well as various objects and in particular a bust of each of the illustrious visitors. . The brevity of the stay and the time taken to make the famous mirror of the toilet service, did not allow the sculptor of the queen, Louis-Simon Boizot, to finish the busts which could not be part of the gift delivered to the tsarevich at the end of the year 1782. So much so that the sculptor used the physiognomy of a bust of Marie-Antoinette which he had made in marble in 1781, then in biscuit that same year of 1782 (both kept at the Louvre), to design that of the future Empress of Russia.

Related work
The original plasters of the Count's busts (26 cm ht) and the Countess of the North (34 cm ht) are kept at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, locker model 327-337.

Literature
Exhibition catalog, Louis-Simon Boizot, King's sculptor and director of the sculpture workshop at the Manufacture de Sèvres, Somogy, 2001, cat. 70, pp. 220-221.