Roubillac

Roubillac, LOUIS-FRANCOIS, sculptor, was born at Lyons in 1695, studied mainly at Paris, where in 1730 he obtained the second Grand Prix, and shortly thereafter settled in London. In England he spelt his name Roubiliac. He visited Rome in 1745. His statue of Handel for Vauxhall Gardens in 1738 first made him popular. His other most famous statues are those of Shakespeare (executed for Garrick, and now in the British Museum), of Sir Isaac Newton at Cambridge, and another of Handel in Westminster Abbey. The monuments of the Duke of Argyll and of General Wade in the Abbey are also well known. He contributed greatly to the improvement of British taste in sculpture, though his own work is by no means so perfect as his contemporaries imagined; he has been called 'an exquisite executant but poor designer.' He died in London, 11th January 1762. See the Life by Le Roy de Sainte Croix (Paris, 1882); A. Dobson in Eighteenth Century Vignettes (1894).