Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741 - 1828) France
Title: Diane Huntress
Bronze Bust
Measure 18"in H x 10"in W and 4 3/4"in W x 4 3/4"in D (Bottom)

Known for: Neo-classical portrait bust and statue sculpture
Biography: Prominent in France during the Enlightenment period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Jean-Antoine Houdon was a neo-classical sculptor, especially noted for his marble portrait busts and statues. His subjects included Americans Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Fulton, and among his French subjects were Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Louis XVI and Napoléon Bonaparte. During the French Revolution, he was censored as a 'bourgeois' because of his association with Louis XVI, but he was not imprisoned. Under the French Consulate, the government between 1799 and 1804, and the French Empire, 1804-1814, when Napoléon took over, Houdon regained his former stature. He executed architectural reliefs, did a statue of Cicero for the Senate, did portrait busts of Napoleon and his wife Josephine, and received the Legion of Honour. In 1785, at the invitation of Benjamin Franklin, America's Minister to France, Houdon traveled with Franklin to America to Virginia, where he visited Mount Vernon to model George Washington, who four years later would be elected President of the United States. From sittings, Houdon made wet-clay life models and a plaster life mask, which later were used, not only by Houdon in Paris for his portrait bust of Washington but for many sculpture works of Washington. Among these Washington subjects are the standing figure statue in the state capitol building in Richmond commissioned by the Virginia General Assembly; many variations of a portrait busts, and a statue in the Vermont State House depicting him in a toga as the Roman Consul Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. Jean-Antoine Houdon died in Paris July 16, 1828, and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

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