At the beginning of the twentieth century, younger sculptors such as
Brancusi complained that Rodin loomed so large that they couldn’t
move forward. “Nothing can grow in the shadow of tall trees,” he
said upon quitting the master’s atelier. Sometimes it seems that
Rodin blocks our view of the past, too, keeping sculptors who
preceded him just out of reach. No one has suffered more from
this neglect than Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828), the greatest
sculptor between Bernini and Rodin, who admired Houdon enormously. There has been no monograph
for nearly thirty years about Houdon’s work and no
retrospective in even longer.
This neglect is all the more strange since Houdon is a fixture of
our national consciousness, thanks to his canonical likenesses of
the country’s founders and early patriots
—figures such as
Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and John Paul Jones. Indeed, we
are daily in more intimate contact with him than with any other
artist, for Houdon’s likeness of Jefferson adorns the nickel
coin.
Happily, this wrong has been righted in the splendid show that Anne
Poulet (the newly appointed director of the Frick Collection) has
organized. It opened at the National Gallery this past spring and
is now at the Getty through January.[1]
Besides including the Americans and
his signature portraits of Voltaire, the show runs the gamut of
Houdon’s career, beginning with student works such as the
Ecorché, or flayed male nude, through mature works such as his
portraits of Diderot, Gluck, and