Mrs Houdon (1787), sculpture realized by his/her husband
A neo-classic sculptorJean-Antoine Houdon is a sculptor whose work appears among most alive and most personal of the end of the XVIII E century. He appeared at the same time like realistic (the Sectional view, 1767) and like an artist inspired, marvelously gifted to collect the fugitive impressions.
Houdon studies in Rome, with the Academy of France, 1764 to 1768 - where it carries out a Saint Bruno, 1767 -, then will be successively the pupil of Slodtz Michel-Angel and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. Among many mythological or allegorical works that it carried out one retains, inter alia, the Diana the Huntress, whose bronze is in Louvre, and a marble with the Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon, the Sensitive to the cold one (1783, museum Fabre, Montpellier), Apollon (1783, Fondation Gulbenkian, Lisbon). During a very whole long career devoted to the sculpture, he will know the favor of his contemporaries: he fills a good amount of orders, in particular for monuments. Its style escapes the rococo and tends to integrate little by little the neoclassicism of the years 1780-1790.
A gallery of portraitsHoudon excels especially in the art of the portrait, where the subtlety of its chisel gives an account of the least smile, of the finest wrinkle, of most secret palpitation, with an acute sense of the psychological truth (portraits of Rousseau and Mirabeau). The glance of these carved portraits seems surprisingly animated: the pupils, twisted in clay or the stone, seem to shine. It thus reaches the top of its art in busts of children (its own family) where the lightness of modelled translated, with a control which touches to perfection, the brittleness and the grace of a young face, and in the female portraits (Louise Brongniart, Mrs Houdon). Sails very about it, the sculptor sees notable writers, artists or to ravel in his workshop. It thus carries out many busts, which are as many testimonies on its contemporaries. Thus it carves the face of Diderot, of Gluck (1775), Turgot (1778) and Buffon (1781). Its sitted Voltaire gains a triumph with the Living room of 1781: it is a daring work and without flattery.
Its fame gained the foreigner what led it to make the portrait of Catherine II of Russia (1773). In 1785, its bust of Benjamin Franklin, then ambassador in Paris of the very young United States of America, gains such a success on the other side of the Atlantic that the sculptor will go there to carry out a statue of George Washington. Of return in France, it will continue to work until under the Napoleonean period.