Jean-Baptiste Defernex

Jean-Baptist Defernex (1729–1783) was a French artist best known for his portrait busts, most often of women.

Little is known of his early training, but he started as a modeler at the Sèvres factory. He was sculptor to the Duc d'Orléans and worked on gilded lead statue groups of children at the Palais-Royal. He was not a member of the Royal Academy, but rather that of St. Luke. He had a school for sculpture and drawing; Louis Jean-Jacques Durameau studied there.

Defernex received no official commissions, and his art seems to have been regarded as rather unfashionable. His portrait busts have been compared to those of Jean-Baptiste Greuze and described as "honest, unidealized, quite free from gallant flattery": "All the graces and tender amorous atmosphere that floated about Madame Favart," the singer and actress who was the subject of a 1762 work, "seem dispelled by his convincingly truthful bust of her."^[1]

Other works include:

Distressed Spirit (1768), a marble fragment of a funeral monument that was destroyed during the French Revolution;
plaster bust of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1772);^[2]
The Milkmaid (1754/60), an example of his Sèvres porcelain, modeled after a work created by François Boucher for Madame de Pompadour's dairy at Crécy.

References

^ Michael Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France 1700–1789 (Yale University Press, 1993), p. 153 online.
^ Monique Barbier, "Abbreviated Chronology of Houdon's Life and Work," in Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment University of Chicago Press, p. 177 online.

External links

Three works (Distressed Spirit, bust of Madame Favart, The Milkmaid) among the collections of the Louvre.

Persondata
Name	Defernex, Jean-Baptiste
Alternative names
Short description	Portrait painter
Date of birth	1729
Place of birth
Date of death	1783
Place of death