ATTRIBUTED TO GILBERT BERTRAND, FRANCE, CIRCA 1494-1510

Saint Roch of Montpellier has, for centuries, been revered as a healer of the sick, especially those stricken by the plague. The present figure of Saint Roch has been long-attributed to the sculptor Gilbert Bertrand. Bertrand supplied a series of extraordinary limestone sculptures for the hospice, or Hôtel Dieu, at Issoudun in the province of Berry. This statue, as the namesake of the entire complex for which it was designed, is perhaps the single most important figure of a group of free-standing limestone statues supplied to Issoudon. The original building has now been transformed into the Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch, where the pair of spectacular Trees of Jesse, which reach from the floor to ceiling, still remain in situ in the original Gothic chapel. These monumental sculptures are a tour-de-force of late Medieval design, and the technical brilliance of the stone masons, and were probably carved between 1494 and 1510. These two groups, with their arboreal architecture and dense foliage support multiple, almost fully-carved figures, which all relate closely to the present figure. Most of the Issoudun figures also have the elaborate head wear, richly-carved costumes and luxuriant hair and beards of the present figure of Saint Roch. Amazingly, the present figure, unlike those that remain at Issoudun, appears to still retain some of its original polychromy.

In 1875, the municipality of Issoudun built a new hospital and abandoned the original buildings. Shortly afterwards, in 1906, Issoudun sold a group of these individual sculptures from the old hospital, and among them was the present sculpture of Saint Roch. Another statue by Bertrand, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, also originally part of this same group, was bought by J. P. Morgan and is now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (D.2000.06.2).