Jean-Antoine Houdon. French sculptor, born 20 March 1741 in Paris and died there on 16 July 1828. A pupil of M. Slodtz, he won the *prix de Rome* in 1761 but did not go to Rome until 1764, remaining there until 1768.
From his Roman period are the *St Bruno* at S. Maria degli Angeli and the model for what was to be the companion statue representing *St John the Baptist* (Galleria Borghese), derived from the first model of his famous *L’Ecorché*, the fruit of his passion for anatomical studies. On his return to France he won fame especially through his portraits: numerous examples were shown at the *Salon* of 1777, among them those of the Count and Countess of Provence, Princesses Victoire and Adélaïde, Turgot, Gluck, 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 no less famous seated statue of Voltaire at the Comédie Française, which concluded a long series of portraits of the philosopher. Among other busts are to be remembered those of Rousseau (1779), of Buffon, and of Louis XVI (1787). On 22 July 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 in 1796 in the Capitol at Richmond. His activity did not cease even with the advent of the Revolution (busts of Bailly, La Fayette, Necker, 1791), but
in his later years his work shows clear signs of decline (bust of General Napoleon, 1806; standing statue of Voltaire at the Panthéon; bust of Alexander I, 1814). Among his religious works may also be recalled the relief representing Christ giving the keys to St Peter, formerly on the pediment of Ste-Geneviève and destroyed after the church’s consecration, and another St Bruno in the Museum at Dijon.
The journey to Rome was certainly decisive for the art of the French sculptor, who in Rome, under the influence of Winckelmann and fascinated especially by the art of Michelangelo, abandoned the Baroque style in which he had been trained by Slodtz and turned to Classicism. A Classicism which, even if it stiffened in his hands, places him among the most significant representatives of the new French sculpture, which found its counterpart in painting in J. L. David. The two statues of St Bruno, both in Rome—Slodtz’s in St Peter’s and Houdon’s in S. Maria degli Angeli—serve excellently to define the contrast between the old and the new way of seeing. But Houdon’s fame is chiefly bound up with his portraits, executed with special care as regards the expression of the face and tending therefore to a decisive individual characterization: for the sculptor, a careful realist, always had as one of the principles of his art—so he himself said—the preservation of the truth of form.
GILBERTO RONCI