Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger

Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger was born on 15 February 1704 in Paris, the son of the sculptor Jean-Louis Lemoyne, who gave him his first training. He went on to study under the sculptor Robert Le Lorrain from 1723. In 1725 he won the Prix de Rome from the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture, but he did not take up the customary residency in Rome.

He was appointed sculptor to Louis XV, producing portrait busts of the king across his reign. In 1730 a contract was signed for a bronze equestrian statue of Louis XV, destined for Bordeaux and completed in 1743. A further statue of Louis XV followed for Rennes in 1754, and he produced monumental statuary for the Gardens of Versailles. His portrait busts extended well beyond the king to figures including Voltaire (1748), Montesquieu (1767), and Madame de Pompadour (1761).

Lemoyne's Paris studio is widely credited with training several of the next generation's most important sculptors, including Jean-Antoine Houdon, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, and Jean-Jacques Caffieri, a lineage said to have carried his workshop's influence from Rococo elegance into the Neoclassical style. He died in Paris on 25 May 1778, at the age of 74.

Contemporary and modern institutions alike have placed Lemoyne at the center of French court portraiture. The National Galleries of Scotland describes him as being among the greatest French portraitists of his century, and he was appointed sculptor to Louis XV, a role that placed his work at the heart of royal image-making for much of the mid-eighteenth century. His enduring critical standing rests as much on this teaching lineage, running through Houdon, Falconet, Pigalle, and Caffieri, as on his own royal commissions.

Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger's market is thin and not well documented in public sources. Auction aggregators show a modest number of sales attributed to him: a signed and dated terracotta was offered at Jackson's International Auctioneers without a disclosed price, while a pair of busts offered at Sotheby's carried an estimate of USD 50,000 to 70,000. In neither case, nor in any other source reviewed, could a confirmed hammer price be verified, so no all-time auction record can be reported with confidence at this time. His most important works, including the Metropolitan Museum's Louis XV bust, the Walters Art Museum's Bust of Fontenelle, and holdings at the National Gallery of Art and the National Galleries of Scotland, are in museum collections rather than in private trade. No current gallery or estate representation could be confirmed; when works do appear, it is through major auction houses such as Sotheby's.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger, and attribution depends on museum scholarship, provenance, and comparison with signed or well-documented busts. Because several members of the Lemoyne family worked as sculptors in the same period, most notably his father Jean-Louis Lemoyne, and because auction and museum databases render his name inconsistently (Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger, Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne, or Lemoyne, Jean-Baptiste II), collectors should treat name variants carefully when researching a work's history. The public auction record for the artist is sparse, with disclosed estimates limited to a handful of recent lots, so any single sale result should be read with caution rather than treated as representative of the market as a whole.