Hubert Le Sueur

Hubert Le Sueur (c. 1580 – 1658) was a French sculptor with the contemporaneous reputation of having trained in Giambologna's Florentine workshop. He assisted Giambologna's foreman, Pietro Tacca, in Paris, in finishing and erecting the equestrian statue of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf. He moved to England and spent the most productive decades of his working career there, providing monuments, portraits and replicas of classical antiquities for the court of Charles I, where his main rival was Francesco Fanelli.

Henry Peacham was informed that Le Sueur was a pupil of Giambologna in Florence. Though he is not otherwise documented in Florence, in Paris he was recorded as sculpteur du Roy at the baptism of his son at Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois in 1610, when a royal secretary and the daughter of another served as witnesses. In London he and his second wife were of the Huguenot congregation in Threadneedle Street. He worked with Pietro Tacca's assistants on the equestrian bronze of Henri IV on the Pont Neuf, a project that gave him technical skills that were put to use in his equestrian Charles I. Since Inigo Jones had passed through Paris in July 1613, in the train of Lord Arundel, on their way to Strasbourg, Katharine Esdaile suggested that Jones was the one who convinced Le Sueur to go to England.

The earliest occasion on which Le Sueur received an official commission in England was for twelve figures against the frieze of the grand catafalque— both figures and hearse designed by Inigo Jones — in James I's funeral, 1625. In 1631 he was dispatched to Rome to arrange to have moulds taken of classical antiquities, to complement the Borghese Gladiator, moulds of which had been obtained for Charles, and which Le Sueur cast in London for the Privy Garden of the Palace of Whitehall. Henry Peacham praised Le Sueur for his skill and credits the Catholic priest and agent, George Gage, with obtaining the relevant casts in Rome: "The best of them is the Gladiator, molded from that in Cardinall Borgheses Villa, by the procurement and industry of ingenious Master Gage."

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