Hubert Le Sueur - Career

Career

Henry Peacham was informed that Le Sueur was a pupil of Giambologna in Florence. Though he is not otherwise documented in Florence, in Paris he was recorded as sculpteur du Roy at the baptism of his son at Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois in 1610, when a royal secretary and the daughter of another served as witnesses. In London he and his second wife were of the Huguenot congregation in Threadneedle Street. He worked with Pietro Tacca's assistants on the equestrian bronze of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf, a project that gave him technical skills that were put to use in his equestrian Charles I. Since Inigo Jones had passed through Paris in July 1613, in the train of Lord Arundel, on their way to Strasbourg, Katharine Esdaile suggested that Jones was the one who convinced Le Sueur to go to England.

The earliest occasion on which Le Sueur received an official commission in England was for twelve figures against the frieze of the grand catafalque— both figures and hearse designed by Inigo Jones — in James I's funeral, 1625. In 1631 he was dispatched to Rome to arrange to have moulds taken of classical antiquities, to complement the Borghese Gladiator, moulds of which had been obtained for Charles, and which Le Sueur cast in London for the Privy Garden at Whitehall. On a recommendation of Sir Bathazar Gerbier, he cast the famous bronze equestrian statue of the king, made in 1633 for Richard, Lord Weston, Lord High Treasurer, at Roehampton, which has been relocated since 1678 at the original site of Charing Cross, at Trafalgar Square, London (on a small traffic island at the entrance to The Mall). In 1634 he made for the king a cast of the Diane Chasseresse then still at Fontainebleau. Le Sueur created a market for the portrait bust, initiated and epitomized by a series of bronze busts and one marble bust of Charles I (1631), now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the only work in marble by Le Sueur known to exist. A bust of Katherine, Lady Dysart, was formerly at Ham House. There are bronze sculptures by Le Sueur for tombs in Westminster Abbey, on the screen by Inigo Jones in Winchester Cathedral, where Le Sueur provided the bronze reclining figure for the tomb of Lord Portland. At Oxford are his lifesize bronze standing figures of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria, made for Archbishop Laud, 1634, now at St John's College, and of the Earl of Pembroke, formerly in the forecourt at Wilton House, now in the Bodleian Library.

With the beginnings of the English Civil War, English court patronage dried up, and Le Sueur returned to Paris in 1643, produced four busts of Richelieu for the duchesse d'Aiguillon, and disappeared from art history.

His known pupils were both of Huguenot extraction as was Le Sueur himself: Ine was Peter Besnier (or Bennier), was appointed sculptor to the king after Le Sueur's departure; another was John Poultrain, or Colt.