Head of a Girl

During his years in Rome, Saly had been singled out for high praise by De Troy, then Director of the French Academy. One of his earliest commissions came from De Troy - a head of a girl - which may well have represented one of De Troy’s own children. The marble head in the Victoria and Albert Museum is perhaps the original which was duplicated in a variety of media. If the result is charming, the sense is of truthful portraiture: an unsentimentalized, even somewhat sad, rendering of childhood.