Some Unnoticed Works by Pierre Puget

Abstract

The French sculptor Pierre Puget (1620-I694) is documented as having produced sculptures from I656 until his death, a period of thirty-eight years. The technical bravura of his first datable sculpture, the Toulon Caryatides (more properly called Atlantes), suggests that his career might have begun as much as fifteen years earlier.2 Yet only about seventeen stone and bronze works can be positively identified as executed after Puget's designs. It is well known that several of his grandest schemes ended as abortions because of problems with patrons and are now known only by means of a few sketches. Much of the creative effort of Puget was thus wasted. However, it seems highly probable that other sculptures, particularly small ones, and some further studies for projects abandoned before full-scale realization, must have existed. During a year of research in France this writer sought to track down some of these lost works. One important clue as to where such objects might be found appeared in the Puget documentation. It is clear that Puget's grandson Pierre Paul Puget (168o1773) inherited a considerable quantity of his grandfather's sculptures and kept most of them during his long life. When a lawsuit in 1757 forced the sale of one of the four buildings left by Pierre Puget, the villa at Fontgate, an inventory made at the time by Pierre Paul shows everything still intact, though the death of the sculptor had occurred fifty-five years earlier.3 Pierre Paul is also reputed to have maintained a kind of Puget museum in the Marseilles town house of his grandfather.' A large part of the collection probably existed in situ until the death of Mme. Pierre Paul Puget in 1783, though the sale by Pierre Paul of certain important works such as the relief St. Charles Borromeo and the Plague is documented. Thus a substantial part of Puget's property and many of his sculptures and drawings were apparently dispersed in Provence between 1770 and the ninth decade of the century. Some of these undoubtedly were destroyed during the French Revolution; however, there seemed to be a good possibility that others, especially smallscale ones, survived that upheaval and entered anonymously some of the numerous collections formed by Provengal amateurs just after the revolution. One important collection amassed during just this postrevolutionary period by the Bourguignon de Fabregoules family of Aix-en-Provence was given in its entirety to the Mus6e Granet in 1863 and has consequently remained intact. It contains two wellknown works by Puget, the large drawing of a project for the unexecuted baldachino of the Carignano church in Genoa and a brilliant preliminary terra-cotta bozzetto of the St. Alexander Sauli statue now in the same Genoese church.6 There seemed to be some possibility that still other works by Puget might be found among the substantial quantity of sculptural material from the De Fabregoules collection passing under various great names in the old Aix catalogue but now consigned to oblivion in the storage rooms. Monsieur Malbos, curator of the museum, kindly consented to the examination of the entire collection of sculpture in the reserves. Three works discovered there are probably Puget's original clay studies, heretofore unidentified, for various sculptures, both known and unknown. The first to be recognized was the fine, highly finished small clay sketch for a recently attributed work, the marble bust of Marcus Aurelius after the antique, now in the Municipal Hospital in Genoa (Figs. I and 2).' Miss Rotundi recognized the hand of Puget in the marble bust from Puget's large Abduction of Helen, also in Genoa (Fig. 13), which she had studied carefully.8 Unfortunately, she went beyond