Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828)

Sculptor. Born at Versailles, son of a servant to the court, he studied at the Académie Royale, and in the studios of R.-M. Slodtz, J.-B. Lemoyne and J.-B. Pigalle. He won the prix de Rome in 1761, and whilst studying in the French Academy in Rome, executed a statue of St Bruno (1767) for the church of S. Maria degli Angeli, whose severity is in marked contrast to the more baroque figure of the same saint which his master, R.-M. Slodtz, had sculpted for St Peter’s in 1744. He also made a flayed anatomical figure, known as Houdon’s Ecorché, in preparation for a pendent figure of St John the Baptist, a testimony to Houdon’s search for naturalism, which later became a standard teaching aid in art academies throughout the world. After his return to France in 1768, he travelled to Gotha, where he was commissioned to make portrait busts of members of the house of Saxe Gotha. He later executed a nude figure of Diana the Huntress (1782) for the Duke of Saxe Gotha, which is still at Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha. Despite having executed a number of impressive subject pieces, Houdon was principally famed for his naturalistic and penetrating portraits of eminent persons of the day. Many of these show their subjects in contemporary costume, but the bust which first established Houdon’s reputation as a portraitist, showed the contemporary philosopher, Denis Diderot, dressed all’antica (1771). His full-length seated figure of Voltaire (1781), of which a marble version was later presented by Houdon’s niece to the Comédie Française, is also in antique costume. When commissioned by the state assembly of Virginia to produce a full-length portrait of George Washington, Houdon travelled to the United States in 1785, to study his subject from the life. Washington declined to be portrayed in antique costume, but Houdon made a parallel between Washington and the ancient Roman general Cincinnatus, by placing a plough behind the marble figure of the first American president (1788), which still stands in the State Capitol of Virginia. Houdon exhibited at the Salon for the last time in 1814. In 1914, the State of Virginia presented Great Britain with a bronze cast of Houdon’s Washington statue, to celebrate the centenary of the Treaty of Ghent (which brought to an end Anglo-American hostilities in the period of the Napoleonic Wars); it was erected outside the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, in 1921.

Bibliography: H.H. Arnason, The Sculpture of J.-A. Houdon, London, 1975; J.S. Hallam, ‘Houdon’s Washington in Richmond: Some New Observations’, American Art Journal, November 1978, pp. 72–80; A. Poulet, Jean-Antoine Houdon. Sculpture of Enlightenment (exhib. cat.), Chicago, 2003; L. Réau, Houdon: sa vie et son œuvre, Paris, 1924; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxxviii, 203, 293, 299–300.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011