Netherlandish, Late 18th Century

Sotheby's New York, 26 January 2012, lot 348;

Where acquired by Aso O. Tavitian.

Pairs of busts of crying and laughing children, showing the range of human emotion, were inspired by the Enlightenment fascination with physiognomy and probably derived from paired representations of the laughing and weeping ancient philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus. Northern artists such as Hendrick de Keyser and Jan Claudius de Cock produced similar pairs of children, as did later sculptors working in England such as Louis-François Roubiliac.