On view
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Molière),
1778
Houdon depicted seventeenth-century comedic playwright Molière with an animated, sidelong glance, as if he is about to comment on the folly of humankind, one of the primary themes of his writing. This is a plaster version of a 1779 marble bust that the sculptor produced for the French royal theater in Paris. Cast in a mold, its surface was reworked while still wet to create a sense of spontaneity.
More Context
Houdon created an unparalleled array of busts of his contemporaries and heroes of the past. The Comédie Française, the French royal theater, commissioned a portrait of Molière, the author of comedies, for its foyer. The marble version (1779) is still on view there. This fine plaster was reworked while still wet to show the verve of an original terracotta. The playwright, with an animated sidelong glance, seems about to comment on the folly of humankind. It is unclear whether this bust had a pendant. In the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans, a bust of Molière is paired with one of the poet La Fontaine, and at least three other such paired busts were acquired by Houdon’s patrons. This pairing provides insight into the interest these authors held for the eighteenth century. Both Molière (1622–1673) and La Fontaine (1621–1695) helped shape the French language in its Golden Age: Molière’s comedies, schools of social behavior, contributed phrases, characters, and situations to world literature, while La Fontaine, who composed moralistic animal fables, was one of the greatest stylists in French. In the Enlightenment, people looked to comedy rather than tragedy to help reform society, and in the Age of Revolution, theater played a guiding role as relations among social classes were changing. These authors, who suggested paradigms for a new French society, could be considered appropriate replacements for the sages whose busts had decorated libraries in antiquity, the humanist Renaissance, and the eighteenth-century Neoclassical period.
Information
1778
