610. Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828),

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, or Molière, 1781.

Terra cotta with plaster restorations on

circular gray marble base, 50 x 49 x 33 cm.

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans.

 

 

Jean Antoine Houdon

(1741 Versailles – 1828 Paris)

 

French sculptor, Jean Antoine Houdon entered the École Royale de Sculpture at the age of twelve, and at twenty, having learnt all he could from Michelangelo Slodtz and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, won the Prix de Rome and left France for Italy, where he spent the next ten years. His brilliant talent delighted Pope Clement XIV, who on seeing the St. Bruno executed by Houdon for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, said “he would speak, were it not that the rules of his order impose silence.” In 1769, he sent Morpheus to the Salon and this work procured him his “agrégation” to the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, of which he was made a full member in 1775. Between these dates Houdon had not been idle; busts of Catherine II, Diderot and Prince Galitzin were observed at the Salon of 1777. At the 1775 Salon he produced not only his Morpheus in marble, but busts of Turgot, Gluck and Sophie Arnould as Iphigeneia, together with his well known marble relief, “Grive suspendue par les pattes.” He also took an active part in teaching at the academy, executing for the instruction of his pupils the celebrated Ecorché still in use. To every salon Houdon was a chief contributor; most of the leading men of the day were his sitters. His busts are remarkable portraits, and in 1778, when news of Rousseau’s death reached him, Houdon set out at once for Ermenonville, and there took a cast of the dead man’s face, from which he produced the grand and life like head now in the Louvre. In 1779 his bust of Molière at the Comédie Française won universal praise, and the celebrated draped statue of Voltaire, in the vestibule of the same theatre, was exhibited at the Salon of 1781, to which Houdon also sent a statue of Marshal de Tourville, commissioned by the King. Three years later he went to America, to carry out the statue of Washington. Houdon left France in 1785 with Benjamin Franklin, whose bust he had recently executed. Staying some time with Washington at Mount Vernon, he modelled the bust with which he decided to return to Paris. There, he completed the statue destined for the capital of the State of Virginia. After his return to his native country, Houdon executed for the king of Prussia, as a companion to a statue of Summer, The Chilly Woman, a naïf embodiment of shivering cold, which is one of his best as well as one of his best known works. The Revolution interrupted the busy flow of commissions. Under Napoleon, Houdon received little employment; he was, however, commissioned to execute the colossal relief’s intended for the decoration of the column of the “Grand Army” at Boulogne, and various busts, among which may be cited those of Marshal Ney, Josephine and Napoleon himself, by whom Houdon was rewarded with the Legion of Honour.