Houdon. (Current and Coming).(Jean-Antoine Houdon, sculpture, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

The French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon, who Thomas Jefferson thought was "unrivaled in Europe," is still considered to have been the finest sculptor in Europe during the Enlightenment. Yet until now there has not been an international exhibition devoted to this remarkable artist. A traveling exhibition entitled Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment opens on May 4 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it remains on view until September 7. It then travels to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and finally to the Musee national du chateau de Versailles. The show comprises more than sixty of Houdson's finest works in marble, plaster, terracotta, and bronze as well as a painting of Houdon at work in his studio by Louis Leopold Boilly.

Houdon's oeuvre is fascinating for the penetrating and accurate likenesses he created of many of the most important figures of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They included such writers and philosophers as Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Moliere; the founding fathers of the United States, George Washington, Benjamin Franidin, and Jefferson; and rulers such as Catherine the Great and Napoleon land Josephine. In addition he created statues of biblical, mythological, and allegorical figures of great psychological depth.

Houdon took a less traditional route than most artists in eighteenth-century Paris. He did not show all his work at the Salon (all his female nudes were rejected during the reign of Louis XVI), but opened his studio in the Bibliotheque du Roi to the public. Although members of the royal court generally preferred the work of Jean Jacques Caffieri, Houdon enjoyed widespread patronage. He took painstaking measurements with calipers for his portraits, had a unique technique for rendering eyes, and was not averse to mass-producing his sculptures (particularly of famous people), which was generally accomplished by those employed in his workshop.

While many aristocrats commissioned portraits of themselves or members of their family, they did not, for ...