This marble bust of Henry James Turner was made by the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux in London in 1873.

Dividing the critics in his lifetime with works provoking in turn scandal or rapture, Carpeaux (1827–75) was one of the most influential sculptors of the nineteenth century. Born in Valenciennes, in 1838 his family settled in Paris, where he studied at the Petite Ecole and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1844-54). Obtaining the Grand Prix de Rome in 1854, he spent a fruitful period in Italy (1856-61) during which he produced his masterpiece, ‘Ugolino’. He returned to France to establish himself as the leading sculptor of the Second Empire, becoming the imperial family’s favourite (if not official) sculptor. At his untimely death at the age of 48, he became enshrined as the heir to Michelangelo, sitting between the masters of the eighteenth century and Rodin.

The fall of Napoleon III in Summer 1870 put Carpeaux’s career in peril. The following year, during the rule of the short-term radical government of the Paris Commune, he made the first of several stays in London (residing at 34 Brompton Square from May to December that year), in search for new patrons. One of them was the paint and varnish manufacturer Henry James Turner (1831-1924), of Hamilton Terrace in St John’s Wood, who was an avid collector of contemporary British art and French art, by the likes of David Roberts, John Everett Millais, Rosa Bonheur and Jean-Léon Gérôme. (It is likely the latter who introduced Carpeaux to Turner). Turner probably owned ‘La Frileuse’ and in addition to a sculpture of ‘Flore accroupie’ (‘Crouching’ Flora, exhibited at the RA in 1873), Turner commissioned from Carpeaux a portrait of he and his wife, Louisa Turner (1840-1923), née Westall, whom he had married in 1859.

Henry James Turner (1831-1924) was a successful industrialist, of the second generation of principals in an old-established paint and varnish manufacturing business, Charles Turner & Son, Ltd. This bust was completed in 1873, two years after that of his wife. Carpeaux was in London again, partly to visit the exiled Emperor Napoleon III of whom he completed an official imperial portrait that year (A.43-1983). The original plaster of this bust was in the sale of Carpeaux's studio at the Galerie Manzi in Paris, 30 May 1913.

One of Carpeaux’s great achievements was his renewal of the genre of the portrait bust. His perceptive society portraits stood out for their truth and expressiveness, merging formal and informal, capturing both his sitters’ appearance and character. The portrait of Louisa Turner (1871) epitomises the linking of elegance and virtuosity for which Carpeaux’s female portraits were admired. By contrast, Mr Turner is portrayed in simple contemporary dress, with for sole ornaments a medallion around his neck and a watch’s chain visible under his jacket.

Carpeaux would prove to be a prodigiously influential artist, not the least through his teaching at the Petite Ecole, where he was notably master of Jules Dalou and Auguste Rodin. Of his master, Rodin said: ‘Carpeaux has made the finest busts of our time’. He made also his mark on British sculpture. Writing in 1901 about the development of the so-called New Sculpture in Britain from the mid-1870s onwards, the art critic Marion H. Spielmann, said ‘to Carpeaux, no doubt, the inspiration of the new trend was originally due’.