Alexander Pope was not an obvious candidate to become one of the foremost literary ‘celebrities’ in eighteenth-century Britain. He was doubly an outsider: he faced prejudice on account of his Catholicism, which denied him entry to university, and he suffered a childhood tubercular infection that deformed his spine, stunted his growth, and left him debilitated by constant headaches. Yet Pope’s prodigious talent and manipulation of his public image allowed him to reach widespread renown at a time when authorship itself was being redefined. Pope was one of the first living authors to publish his collected works, at the unprecedentedly young age of twenty-nine, and he organised for his collected letters to be leaked to a publisher while feigning shock at the alleged breach of trust. Portraiture was yet another means by which his fame was reinforced; his image proliferated in every medium, becoming as well known as his literary works.

Fame and Friendship, currently on show at Waddesdon Manor after a run at the Yale Centre for British Art, uses a remarkable group of Pope portraits to provide a window onto the dynamics of celebrity, friendship, and artistic production in this period. The exhibition brings together, for the first time, all eight of the surviving portrait busts of Pope by the French émigré sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac. The logistics of uniting these busts must have been tortuous, but thanks to the efforts of Malcolm Baker and his co-curators, Martina Droth (at Yale) and Juliet Carey (at Waddesdon), the effect is thrilling. At first glance, the airy white drawing room at Waddesdon seems to be filled with almost-identical busts in varying shades. The minimally articulated pillars on which many of the busts are supported create an unobtrusive visual link between each one, encouraging the viewer to compare them and to tease out their subtle differences. Most of the sculptures ‘float’ in the middle of the room – an arrangement alien to the settings they might originally have occupied, but one that urges circumambulation and makes visible their backs, so often hidden from view.

Pope sat to Roubiliac around 1738, at the age of fifty. Fame and Friendship includes the resulting terracotta bust (probably press-moulded from the original model or models) and four subsequent marble busts from this period. A further three busts – one marble, one bronze, and one plaster cast – were produced twenty years later, long after Pope’s death, but using the same prototype. In Roubiliac’s rendering(s), Pope appears with short hair and ‘timeless’ drapery in the antique style. (By contrast, John Michael Rysbrack’s bust of the poet, also on display, depicts him in contemporary dress with a raffishly open collar and long curling hair.) While following the conventions of the classical portrait bust of a ‘worthy’ figure, however, Roubiliac’s bust is far from formulaic. The poet’s head is turned slightly to one side, his eyes are alert, and the sinews in his neck and cheek are tensed, hinting at both his mental agility and his physical travails. The energetic surface handling makes the craggy landscape of his face particularly expressive. Roubiliac succeeded in portraying Pope as simultaneously modern and antique, vivid and venerable. The delicacy of this balancing act is particularly evident in the bust once owned by David Garrick, which is the only example from the series to have blank eyes in the ancient Roman style. This small detail results in a more severe and monumental flavour in comparison to the other busts, whose pupils are incised. Such variations suggest that patrons could customize the appearance of their sculpture, just as they could request particular inscriptions or socle designs to suit their interests, tastes, and décor.

The grouping of Roubiliac’s busts in the white drawing room is preceded by a smaller, darkened room, full of books, prints, paintings, medals, and busts. Here, we learn about the construction of Pope’s celebrity, the design of his books, his association with the gardens at Stowe, and his relationship to French authors and audiences. This room also includes two portraits of Roubiliac, allowing the viewer to compare portrayals of literary and sculptural creativity. In the portrait by Adrien Carpentier, Roubiliac is shown in a moment of inspiration as he works on the model for his statue of Shakespeare, which had been commissioned and posed for by Garrick. The sculptor’s expression mirrors the inspired reverie of his famous subject, setting up an implicit parallel between them. Instead of showing the painstaking, manual work of carving marble, Carpentier shows Roubiliac in the act of spontaneously shaping an idea, thus reinforcing his claim to the status of a liberal, rather than a mechanical, artist. This portrait could perhaps be compared to Pope’s controversial edition of Shakespeare, in which he made so bold as to edit and correct his literary forbear’s works, thereby affirming their artistic equality.

As the exhibition brilliantly demonstrates, Pope, Roubiliac, and Garrick (among many others) sought to insert themselves into a tradition of ‘genius’ creators by association both with established worthies like Shakespeare, and with one another. Portraiture was crucial to the fashioning of a venerable lineage and contemporary context for one’s fame. When Pope published the first volume of his collected Works in 1717, he distributed a portrait of himself in many copies. This print had been engraved by George Vertue from a painting by Pope’s friend Charles Jervas, which depicts the poet as a young, bewigged gallant, meeting the sitter’s eye with confidence and a hint of hauteur. Yet Vertue had not simply reproduced the painting; he placed the portrait within an elaborate fictive frame similar to that used in a well-known print of John Dryden, thus implying Pope’s ascension to the pantheon of great authors worthy of commemoration. Only a few years later, this ascension was confirmed when Jervas’s original portrait was donated to Oxford and put on display at the Bodleian library. Fame and Friendship is particularly interesting when it allows the viewer to follow the thread between such works, although this is sometimes difficult due to confusing discrepancies between the order of the works on the walls and in the exhibition leaflet (available for free).

More so than any of the other portraits on display, Roubiliac’s busts of Pope were positioned at the porous boundary between public and private life. Those carved during Pope’s lifetime seem to have been made for members of his inner circle, such as the brilliant lawyer William Murray, whose own self-conception was shaped by the older poet’s intellectual mentorship. Forty years after he acquired Roubiliac’s bust of Pope, when Murray had been made the 1st Earl of Mansfield, he commissioned a portrait bust of himself from Joseph Nollekens in the same classicizing style. The two busts were displayed in different rooms at Murray’s house, Kenwood, but they shared part of an inscription: a line from Horace that Pope had placed around his portrait on the title page of his 1735 Works. Murray had chosen the same line as his motto when he became a peer. By displaying both these busts near to one another, Fame and Friendship reconstructs their silent conversation, which both expressed and cemented bonds of friendship and intellectual companionship.

Yet Roubiliac’s portrait of Pope was not just a bearer of personal meanings; it also became the defining public image of the poet as a canonised national ‘worthy’. Several years after Roubiliac’s death, Nollekens even copied the bust in marble as a pendant to his own celebrated bust of Lawrence Sterne. This period saw the blossoming of demand for portraits of the famous, whose busts were not only available at great expense in marble and bronze, but also in cheaper materials like plaster, artificial stone, and earthenware. Roubiliac used his own bust of Pope as the basis for plaster casts (probably both for workshop use and for independent sale), as well as bas-reliefs and medals. Other manufacturers seized the opportunity to reproduce and disseminate Pope’s image, resulting in objects as divergent as a cheerfully-coloured enamelled earthenware bust from one of the Staffordshire factories, and a ‘bronzed’ plaster by John Cheere, which was made to decorate a library. The glossy, vernacular earthenware is only loosely based on Roubiliac’s portrait, whereas Cheere’s faux bronze was probably cast from a mould made directly from Garrick’s version of Roubiliac’s bust, with the owner’s permission.

By displaying these objects alongside Roubiliac’s ‘autograph copies’ of his own portrait, Fame and Friendship adds nuance to our understanding of reproduction and commercialization in the eighteenth-century British art world. These ideas could have been explored more deeply if the wall texts, leaflet, and catalogue had given greater detail about techniques of production and reproduction, such as the process of transferring dimensions from a terracotta model to a marble block, the use of moulds, the difficulties of firing, and the amount and nature of the skilled labour necessary for each process. How much did a marble bust cost, in comparison to a bronze, a plaster, or an earthenware bust? Such details might help us begin to address the more complex issues of the status and desirability of particular reproductions. The exhibition productively suggests that we might consider all Roubiliac’s work to be on a spectrum of reproduction, rather than forcing it into the categories of ‘original’ and ‘copy’. It might even be argued that Roubiliac’s portrait acquired authority, cachet, and value precisely because it existed in so many versions, having been reproduced both artisanally and mechanically, in high-status, labour-intensive materials as well as in low-cost ones, both within the workshop and by other artists and manufacturers.

It is a mark of its conceptual richness that Fame and Friendship raises more questions than it can answer in the space of just two rooms. It opens up numerous avenues for future research and for much larger exhibitions, and it whets the appetite for Malcolm Baker’s long-awaited book on sculptural portraiture in eighteenth-century Britain. It also brings to life the complex but intangible network of relationships in which sitters, artists, patrons, and the broader consuming public were all embedded in this period. It prompts the viewer to look more carefully at all eighteenth-century portraits, not simply as memorials of personal relationships or public tastes, but also as active participants in the creation of friendship and fame.

Fame and Friendship is at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, from 18th June to 26th October 2014.

Above: View of the exhibition Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust in Eighteenth-Century Britain at Waddesdon Manor, The Rothschild Collection (The National Trust). Photo: © Richard Bryant / arcaidimages.com.