c. 1782-1783

Bust of the Poet Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695)

French (active Paris), 1741 - 1828

In 1781, Monsieur Haudry, an art collector in Orléans, France, commissioned a terracotta bust of the poet Jean de La Fontaine as a companion piece to an earlier bust by Houdon showing the playwright Molière. As a point of departure for depicting La Fontaine, Houdon used a seventeenth-century image by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743). In revising the terracotta composition for this marble, the artist enlarged the lower part of the portrait, rendering it grander and making it, in its form, more like a seventeenth-century bust. This sculpture was probably the one Houdon exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1783.