HOUDON, JEAN-ANTOINE. - French sculptor, b. March 20, 1741 in Paris and d. there July 16, 1828. A pupil of M. Slodtz, he won the "prix de Rome" in 1761 but did not go to Rome until 1764, and remained there until 1768.
From the Roman period date the St. Bruno in S. Maria degli Angeli and the model of what was to be the companion statue representing St. John the Baptist (Galleria Borghese), derived from the first model of his famous Flayed Man, the fruit of his passion for anatomical studies. Having returned to France, he acquired fame especially with portraits: numerous were those exhibited in the Salon of 1777, among which are remembered those of the count and countess of Provence, of the princesses Victoire and Adélaïde, of Turgot, of Gluck, of Mme Jaucourt, etc. One of his most celebrated busts is certainly that of Molière (1776), preserved in the foyer of the Théâtre-Français, and of 1781 is the other no less famous statue representing Voltaire seated, at the Comédie Française, which concluded a long series of portraits of the philosopher. Among the other busts are to be recalled that of Rousseau (1779), of Buffon, of Louis XVI (1787). On July 22, 1785 he went for a few days to America with Franklin (whose portrait he had also made), to prepare the sketches for the statue of G. Washington, erected later in 1796 in the Capitol of Richmond. His activity was not interrupted even by the onset of the Revolution (busts of Bailly, of La Fayette, of Necker, 1791), but toward his last years his work shows clear signs of decline (busts of General Napoleon, 1806; standing statue of Voltaire, at the Pantheon; bust of Alexander I, 1814). Among his religious works are still remembered the relief representing Jesus giving the keys to St. Peter, formerly on the pediment of Ste-Geneviève and destroyed following the deconsecration of the church, and another St. Bruno in the Museum of Dijon.
The journey to Rome was certainly decisive for the art of the French sculptor who precisely in Rome, under the influence of Winckelmann and fascinated especially by the art of Michelangelo, renounced the Baroque art in which he had been trained by Slodtz, in order to strive toward classicism. A classicism that, even if in him it became frozen, places him among the most significant representatives of the new French sculpture which found at the same time in painting its leader in G. L. David. The two statues of St. Bruno, both in Rome, that of Slodtz in St. Peter's and that of H. in S. Maria degli Angeli, can serve excellently to define the contrast between the old and the new way of seeing. But the fame of H. is above all linked to the portraits, carefully executed especially as regards the expression of the face and therefore tending toward a decided individual characterization: which the sculptor, an attentive realist, always had as the principle of his art - as he himself said - "the preserving of the truth of forms."