This marble bust of Louisa Turner was made by the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux in London in 1871.

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 came to 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, now Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon), Turner commissioned from Carpeaux a portrait of him and his wife, Louisa Turner (1840-1923), née Westall, whom he had married in 1859.

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. Among Carpeaux’s ravishing portraits of women, that of Louisa Turner, in Edouard Papet’s words, ‘linked elegance with virtuosity’. For Edward Morris, this 'splendid bust ... shows rather his Baroque sense of movement, expression and grandeur'. Two versions were produced: one d’apparat (or formal portrait with jewellery) now in the V&A collection and another ‘intime’ (plaster at the Musée d’Orsay, marble at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes). The plaster model for the V&A bust is in Copenhagen (Ny Carlsberg Glypotek) and still retains the drop earrings which have broken off the marble version here. Two years later Carpeaux produced a marble bust of Mr Turner (A.20-1984), as a companion piece.

Carpeaux’s range of influences included the 18th century. He chose to depict Mrs Turner in a style and composition reminiscent of 1750s, but with the vivacity he introduced to nineteenth century portrait sculpture. The brilliant depiction of the dress and virtuoso marble carving, retaining the vibrancy of the original model, are a re-working of an earlier idiom to perform new functions. Patrons whose wealth often came from industry and trade were often represented in a style of a previous era. In this way they are associated with the pre-Revolution, grand and aristocratic earlier age.

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’.