At the beginning of the twentieth century, younger sculptors such as Brancusi complained that Rodin loomed so large that they couldn’t move forward. “Nothing can grow in the shadow of tall trees,” he said upon quitting the master’s atelier. Sometimes it seems that Rodin blocks our view of the past, too, keeping sculptors who preceded him just out of reach. No one has suffered more from this neglect than Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828), the greatest sculptor between Bernini and Rodin, who admired Houdon enormously. There has been no monograph for nearly thirty years about Houdon’s work and no retrospective in even longer.

This neglect is all the more strange since Houdon is a fixture of our national consciousness, thanks to his canonical likenesses of the country’s founders and early patriots —figures such as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and John Paul Jones. Indeed, we are daily in more intimate contact ...

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