Important bronze proof with brown patina, depicting the goddess “Diane Chasseresse”, after the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon.
In Roman mythology, "Diana" is the goddess of procreation, hunting, the wilderness, and the night.
Daughter of "Zeus" and "Leto", twin sister of "Apollo", she is associated with the Moon, as opposed to her brother who is associated with the Sun.
She is associated with the goddess "Artemis" in Greek mythology.
"Diane" is standing, she holds her bow in one hand, her arrow in the other.
She is depicted naked, "Houdon" justified his choice, which did not conform to the customs of the time, by the fact that for him, the nudity of the gods, who have a perfect body, is not immodest unlike that of Men.
Old edition sculpture, signed “HOUDON” in hollow, on the naturalist terrace.
Period second part of XIX th century, circa 1880.
Very good state of preservation and patina.

The work is close to the neoclassical movement in the fidelity of the face to Antiquity.
The very refined, simple appearance of the whole is also classic, as is the linear purity of the contours.
The serenity of the whole and its sincerity always mark this return to Antiquity.

Height: 81 cm

Jean – Antoine Houdon (1741-1828)

Jean-Antoine Houdon, born March 20, 1741 in Versailles, famous French sculptor, he is one of the most important statuaries of the XVIII th century, renowned for the realistic rendering of his works.

The fact that his father worked as a caretaker at the Royal School for Protected Students probably made his beginnings easier.
A student at the Royal Academy before the age of fifteen, a boarder at the School for Protected Students (1761-1764), then at the French Academy in Rome (1764-1768), approved by the Royal Academy in 1769, he was received as a member of the latter in 1777, upon presentation of his Morphée (Louvre).

If in 1793 he was among the first to spontaneously renounce his title and his academic privileges, he was elected member of the new Institute in 1795, and successfully presented his candidacy for the Order of the Legion of Honor in 1803.
Neither his two trips to Germany (1771 and 1773), nor his trip to the United States (1785), nor his marriage (1786), nor even the revolutionary turmoil disturbed his creative activity, the most visible manifestation of which was the regularity with which he exhibited at the Salons: from 1769 to 1795, he presented a fairly large number of sculptures every two years.

Very skilled in working marble, Houdon also has a great talent for shaping clay and plaster.
His work is characterized by realism and precision in the representation of bodies, and in particular busts where he excels and which he knows how to make very lively.
According to Grimm, "Houdon was perhaps the first sculptor who knew how to model eyes."

If it was necessary to prove that one can be a genius artist by leading a perfectly ordered existence, by fiercely defending his material interests and by showing an opportunism tempered with indifference towards the political events of his time, the life of Jean Antoine Houdon would suffice to prove it.