Balloon fneze on Robertson Tomb
One of the most copied funerary sculptures in the world is tucked away in the Jewish section of Pere-Lachaise. Little is known about Jacob Robles, but much is known about the sculptor, Auguste Preault. The Robles tomb sculpture, which became known as The Silence was sculpted by Preault in marble between 1842 and 1843. By 1861 the sculpture had become so famous that it was featured in an article inLe Magasin Pittoresque. The article reads in part, The roundel known as Le Silence was created for the tomb of Jacob Robles [1782-1842] in the Jewish section of the Parisian cemetery, Pere-Lachaise. Abandoning traditional funerary imagery, Auguste Preault fashioned an enigmatic and mysterious evocation of death in the skeletal face which is shrouded in drapery with a finger touching the lips. In part the image drew upon the traditional monastic symbol for silence in the cloisters, but here the sculptor also conveys a sense of ambiguity by leaving open whether the figure is living or dead. When Prenault exhibited a bronze cast of Le Silence in 1849, it was hailed as one of the representative works of modern art and became an icon of Romanticism
Antoine-Augustin Preault, usually known as Auguste Preault, was born in Paris in 1809. He was a student of David d’Angers and made his Paris Salon debut in 1833. During his long career, he crafted a number of evocative reliefs. Unfortunately many of them were destroyed or severely damaged during political uprisings (Preault was politically outspoken and his creations often became a target for those with opposing views). Preault’s most famous surviving work is a bronze relief he crafted in 1876 titled Ophelia. It is displayed at the Musee d’ Orsay on the Left Bank across the Seine from the Tuileries. Auguste Preault died in 1879 and is buried in Division 49.
In the early seventeenth century, Scottish settlers began entering Ulster in the north of Ireland, when King James I gave Catholic land to English and Scottish Protestants in an attempt to control the territory. Ho Chi Minh City Map The migration of the Scots to Ulster continued through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Scots planters in the 1630s became increasingly alienated by the Stuart religious policies, when the king established the Church of Ireland as the official church. Although the Presbyterians had tried to adapt their ecclesiastical system to the demands of the Stuart policy, with only moderate success, they found increasingly that the two were incompatible. Furthermore, a strong Scottish evangelical movement concerned them, as did the persecution of the English Puritans, who emigrated in 1620. When James I died in 1625, Charles I, his son, proved an aggressive defender of his church, imposing new taxes and threatening to take church lands, as well as dealing harshly with the Covenanters, as those Scots who signed the National Covenant to uphold the Presbyterian religion were called. Charles I’s behavior led to the English Civil War, and he was beheaded in 1649. The Stuart rule gave way to the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. In 1690, England and France went to war.
