Attributed to Simon Guillain (Paris, 1581-1658) Head of Louis XIII as a child, c. 1610 in Tonnerre limestone carved in the round. The head is crowned with a high, fleur-de-lys crown and a laurel wreath worn over the hair; the face has full cheeks, prominent eyeballs, eyes with hemmed and hollowed lacrimal wattles, and a small mouth with loose lips; the medium-length hair forms a series of wavy, curly locks around the face, with the center drilled with a drill bit. Height 43.5 Width 27.5 Depth 28 cm (some accidents and missing parts) Pedestal. Total height 60.5 cm. Provenance: former collection of Jacques Pouillon (1935-2011), sculptor and antique dealer, Versailles. Attributed to Simon Guillain, ca. 1610. A large sculpted limestone head of King Louis XIII as a child. LA TÊTE DE LOUIS XIII ENFANT, by Laurence Fligny The fate of Louis the Thirteenth Following the assassination of his father Henri IV, young Louis was crowned king in Reims on October 17, 1610, at the age of nine, and took the name of Louis the Thirteenth. We still have a few engravings and drawings of this event, including one by François Quesnel at the Bnf, as well as tokens and medals. Other depictions of the young king at the same age show a child with rounded cheeks, as in Léonard Gaultier's engraving or the painting by Pourbus in the Pitti Palace. In addition to the "puffed cheeks" characteristic of the young monarch, this imposing stone head features protruding eyeballs with thick eyelids, another physical trait shown in portraits of the adult sovereign, such as the bronze bust produced around 1643, long attributed to Jean Varin and now given to Bordoni. A portrait of the king's glory None of these portraits, however, depicts him wearing both crowns, the royal and the laurel. We are therefore in the presence of an image glorifying the young Louis XIII at the age of his coronation. It's hard to imagine what type of commemorative monument this imposing head, over forty centimetres high, might have belonged to. The desire to create such a statue could only have emanated from a high authority, close to power, such as the regency of Marie de Médicis or the council of a large provincial town. However, the archives make no mention of such a commission. The limestone, analyzed by geologist Annie Blanc, is a "white mitritic limestone of the Tonnerre type". Although widely used in Burgundy and as far afield as Champagne, this stone was also used in Paris and the Paris region, as well as at Versailles, in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Simon Guillain, an outstanding sculptor For such an important effigy of the young king, the commissioner had to turn to an artist of some renown or with serious training. A few names come to mind of sculptors who might have responded to this type of commission in 1610: Barthélémy Tremblay (Louves-en-Parisis, circa 1568 - Paris, 1636), Guillaume Bertelot (Le Havre, circa 1583 - Paris, 1648) or Simon Guillain (Paris, 1589 - Paris, 1658). The latter, however, seems the most likely to be the author of this astonishing sculpture. Born in Paris in 1589, he was the son and pupil of sculptor Nicolas Guillain, known as Cambrai, who died in the capital in 1639. Founder, among other artists, of the Académie in 1648, Simon Guillain is best known as the author of the Pont au Change royal monument erected to the glory of the young Louis XIV, between 1639 and 1647, which depicted bronze statues of the sovereign - at the age of 9 - between Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, a monument considered to be the pinnacle of his career. All these sculptures are now in the Louvre. This was not his first depiction of the king, having previously created a full-length statue of Louis XIII to adorn the porte cochère of the consular judges' building on rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, demolished shortly after the Revolution. This stone sculpture depicted him "with submissive lions at his feet, alluding to his advantages over Spain". He is also known to have depicted Saint Louis as Louis XIII in the altarpiece at Saint-Eustache. His reputation as a great portraitist was also well established, as numerous commissioners entrusted him with the creation of praying statues for several tombs between 1620 and 1630, including those in marble of Chrétienne Leclerc († 1628) and Charlotte-Catherine de la Tremoille († 1629), both in the Louvre (inv. LP 414 and 400, fig. f and g). The locks all around the face of the latter, with the toupee raised above the fro