The sculpture portrays Anne-Ange Houdon (1788–1843), the second of the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon’s three daughters, at the age of just fifteen months, in bust form, mounted on a gray marble socle. The young girl with vigorously modeled curly hair is shown turning to her left, smiling gently. The bust is full of vivacity and sensitivity in the modeling, in the flesh of the cheeks and the half-open mouth. The eyes, demonstrating a technique invented by Houdon, are sculpted with the iris formed from three deepening concentric circles, a punched hole for the pupil, and a little section of clay at the top of eye.

Houdon is one of the greatest European sculptors of the eighteenth century, a preeminent recorder of the images of the great men and women who lived in France and elsewhere in Europe, during the final decades of the ancien régime. The years leading up to the 1789 Revolution were the high point in France of the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement which sought truth through reason, direct empirical observation, and study of the natural and human worlds. With their carefully modulated naturalism that at the same time never ignores beauty, Houdon’s portraits reflect brilliantly the Enlightenment search for truth and veracity, as well as the artist’s own belief that the most beautiful forms were also the most natural. From an early age, Houdon showed strong independence of mind. When studying in Rome in the 1760s, he learnt through dissection and the study of corpses the forms of the human body and its muscle and bone structures. On his return to Paris, Houdon became internationally celebrated for his portraits of Enlightenment figures such as Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778). Although he did relatively little work for the French crown, commissions flooded in from courts throughout Europe. Houdon is also one of the emblematic portraitists of the fledgling United States, making vivid likenesses of several of the leading figures in the new state. He survived the French Revolution and adapted to the new political circumstances of the Empire, depicting the Emperor Napoleon I and his first wife, Josephine.

Houdon’s fresh and engaging portraits of his wife and his three children have always been immensely popular. The sculptor seems to have relished depicting his wife, Marie-Ange Cécile Langlois (1765–1823), whom he married in 1786, and their three daughters, Sabine (1787–1836), Anne-Ange, and Claudine (1790–1878). All were portrayed in a series of busts from the late 1780s onward, Sabine on several occasions and at different ages by the sculptor, the first when she was just ten months old, and then again at the age of four and as an adolescent.¹ Anne-Ange and Claudine, on the other hand, were only portrayed once each, both in early infancy. The portraits of Marie-Ange and the two early images of Sabine all show the sitters bare-shouldered, like the portrait of Anne-Ange. On the other hand, the bust of the youngest daughter, Claudin, of which the marble version is in the Worcester Art Museum, shows her draped.²

Anne-Ange Houdon was baptized in Paris on December 15, 1788, and died on October 28, 1843. In 1806 she married a doctor, Jean Baptiste Esprit Louyer de Villermay, with whom she had a son, Eugène de Villermay, who was to remain childless. His wife, Berthe, is said to have distributed among her own family her share of Houdon’s inheritance after her husband’s death.

It is difficult to trace individual works from among the large number of sculptures of Houdon’s family that, unsurprisingly, remained with his immediate family before passing into the hands of descendants. Georges Giacometti noted that the bust of Anne-Ange was always recorded in family documents as a “bust of a child with curly hair” (Buste d’enfant à tête bouclée). The dealer Arnold Seligmann categorically stated in his invoice that the Straus bust had come directly from the family of “the daughter of the sitter,” presumably meaning Berthe, in fact the daughter-in-law. Since according to Paul Vitry, on being widowed Berthe became religious and gave to her own family what she possessed of the Houdon inheritance,³ these gifts may well therefore have included the present sculpture. Another version, probably in patinated plaster, when it was sold by the Perrin-Houdon family in 1914, had a label that also identified it as coming from Madame Villermay,⁴ although it has elsewhere been stated to have a provenance from Claudine and her husband, Désiré-Raoul Rochette.⁵ Another version in tinted plaster, from Claudine’s side of the family, seems still to have been in the Perrin-Houdon family in 1928, but apparently bore Houdon’s studio seal.⁶

The Straus bust was in fact long thought to be made of patinated plaster. It was only following scientific examination that it was confirmed as a work in terracotta. Many commentators have also failed to note Houdon’s signature.⁷

The original plaster of the portrait of Anne-Ange, now in the Musée du Louvre, was exhibited at the Salon in 1791, where it was described in the first edition of the catalogue (no. 234) as “Mlle Ange Houdon at fifteen months.”⁸ It was the model for a marble version, which is also now in the Louvre, acquired in 2017, and which may have belonged to Anne-Ange’s sister Claudine. There is yet another version in the Louvre, a studio cast in patinated plaster.

—Jeremy Warren