Jean Antoine Houdon Biography
Jean-Antoine Houdon (Versailles, 25 March 1741 – Paris, 15 July 1828) was a neoclassical French sculptor. Houdon's artistic training took place, from 1752, at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris under the guidance of Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, in an atmosphere impregnated by the tendencies of neoclassicism. In 1761 Houdon moved to Rome to specialize at the French Academy. He thus had the opportunity to deepen his knowledge of classical, Renaissance and Baroque art. Houdon is famous for his busts and statues of Enlightenment philosophers, inventors and politicians. Some of his subjects were Denis Diderot (1771), Benjamin Franklin (1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1778), Voltaire (1781), Molière (1781), George Washington (1785-88), Cagliostro (1789), Thomas Jefferson (1789), Louis XVI (1790), Robert Fulton, 1803-04, and Napoleon Bonaparte (1806). From 1771 he became a member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, in which a few years later he assumed the role of teacher. Houden's portrait art was characterized by the expression of the fundamental elements of the Enlightenment, such as human truth. In the years following the French Revolution, Houdon, although overtaken by the emerging David, retained his reputation as a master of art among his contemporaries. Houdon collaborated with the famous Lepaute watchmaking workshop, creating small gilded bronze statues, often inspired by Greek mythology. His grave is located at the Montparnasse cemetery. Freemason, he was a member of the Parisian lodge "Les Neufs Soeurs", of the Grand Orient of France.
