Volume 23, Number 5 · April 1, 1976
Luxe et Veritas
By Hugh Honour
The Sculptures of Houdon
by H. H. Arnason
Oxford University Press, 360 pp., $47.50
Early Neo-Classicism in France: The Creation of the Louis Seize Style in Architectural Decoration, Furniture and Ormolu, Gold and Silver, and Sèvres Porcelain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
by Svend Eriksen, edited and translated by Peter Thornton
Humanities Press, 432 pp., $95.00
French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
exhibition catalogue, Grand Palais, Paris, The Detroit Institute of
Wayne State University Press, 712 pp., $14.95
1789: Les emblèmes de la raison
by Jean Starobinski
Flammarion, 194 pp., 95F
The Roman Stamp: Frame and Façade in Some Forms of Neo-Classicism
by Robert M. Adams
University of California Press, 254 pp., $12.50
According to Thomas Jefferson, writing from Paris in 1785, 'There could be no question raised as to the sculptor who should be employed' for a statue of George Washington, 'the reputation of Mons. Houdon, of this city, being unrivaled in Europe.' And although this judgment would not have passed unquestioned by the French artistic establishment of the day (Houdon was seldom employed on official commissions), it has been enthusiastically endorsed by posterity. With the possible exceptions of Falconet and Clodion, he is the only French eighteenth-century sculptor whose name and works are as familiar to the general public as those of half a dozen or more painters of the same period. Nor is this only because sculpture tends to be less popular than painting.
Review, 5234 words
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