Greetings, Madame
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
There is a powerful temptation to believe that the Frick Collection, alone among the cultural institutions of New York, transcends change. In its adorable conservatism, it seems to be ever and always the same thing. But one of the pleasures for frequent visitors is the appreciation of those minor shifts, additions, and enhancements that the collection undergoes over time. A number of new works tend to enter the collection each year, and in recent days, its august halls have been graced by the arrival of Madame His, immortalized in a marble bust from 1775 by the pre-eminent French sculptor of the 18th century, Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828).
As it happens, the good woman, donated by Eugene V. Thaw, now finds herself in the company of three other portrait busts very different from her own. Directly across a narrow gallery fronting on the Frick’s garden court is a portrait of Marquis de Miromesnil, also by Houdon. To her left, are two alabastrine maidens from 300 years earlier, an ethereal young woman of almost unspeakable refinement by the great Florentine sculptor Francesco Laurana, and an altogether sturdier creature, with braided hair and heavy period dress, by another Florentine, Andrea del Verrocchio.
Like these forebears, Madame His, the wife of a German banker living in Paris, is a fully functioning representative of her age, an ambassadress dispatched directly from the Ancien Régime into our time. An air of ineffaceable effeteness marks many of the artifacts of this period, and it is surely evident in Houdon’s flattering treatment of his sitter. Her beauty is marked by a graceful profile and a wispy hairstyle that accentuates her high forehead. Even though Verrocchio’s young woman is made of marble, we can easily imagine robust color in her hair and her costume. In the case of Madame His, by contrast, the pallor of the stone seems to sort well with the blanched softness of her actual person.
Although Madame His is by all accounts a young woman, perhaps not yet out of her 20s, you sense that her hair is decked in that puce-colored gray powder that her age so prized. This portrait is not as vigorously modeled as the bust of the Marquis de Miromesnil and a bit more definition might have been appreciated. But in works of this sort, it is the profile that is apt to be most representative of the artist’s skill, and in the present case, Houdon exhibits a draftsman’s refinement in delineating the progress from the high forehead over the ridge of the nose to the recessed chin. Above all, the dominant artistic thrust of this portrait is its sense of animation, of aliveness, as if the sitter were just about to speak.
Houdon was a fairly young man, not yet 35, when he carved his bust of Madame His, and his long career was sufficiently varied that generalizations are not easy to make. One cannot really identify a quality in him that is importantly different from contemporaries such as Augustin Pajou and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, or even Antoine Coysevox a century before. The main reason for this is that 18thcentury sculpture throughout Europe was not really in the business of originality. Its purpose rather was to refine the terms of the Baroque sculpture on which it was overwhelmingly based. Nevertheless, through the course of his long life, Houdon’s style shifted subtly along with changing historical circumstances.
Although he was a defining figure of the Ancien Régime, Houdon died nearly 40 years after the storming of the Bastille. And while he can capture the grace of the Ancien Régime in Madame His, he also imparts a neoclassical severity to several portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte, and a quality that is downright demotic to the likes of President Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Denis Diderot.
At the same time, Houdon had a very different side to his art, beyond the portraits for which he is perhaps best known. Two superb examples are the Metropolitan Museum’s “La Frileuse,” depicting a young woman shivering in the skimpiest of coverings, and the Frick Collection’s great statue of Diana, with the peerless legatos of its outline. In Diana, the slightly abstracted qualities in the face of Madame His are ennobled to the point of anonymity, as Houdon strives for a pure mythological beauty.
