Jean-Baptiste Defernex

Who was Jean-Baptiste Defernex?

Jean-Baptist Defernex 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."

Other works include:

Distressed Spirit, a marble fragment of a funeral monument that was destroyed during the French Revolution;

plaster bust of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon;

The Milkmaid, an example of his Sèvres porcelain, modeled after a work created by François Boucher for Madame de Pompadour's dairy at Crécy.