Young girl identified as Anne Audéoud of Geneva (1776–1840)

Jean Antoine Houdon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This sketchy plaster, an example of one of the most frequently replicated of Houdon's children's portraits, bears nail heads and markings that apparently served to "point up" a marble version. Although the model has long been attributed to Houdon, the actual date of its conception is uncertain since the different examples bear different dates. Its subject has traditionally been identified as Anne Audéoud, the daughter of a friend of Houdon's great Swiss patron, Jean Girardot de Marigny, in whose collection a bust of that name was documented and who must have commissioned the original. Houdon varied the format of his children's portraits much as he did when modeling the most distinguished figures of his day—sometimes showing them bare-chested, á l'antique, sometimes in modern clothes, as in the fashionably ruffled dress worn here. The plaster captures the original clay's modeling of the whimsically tousled hair, one of Houdon's fortes, somewhat modified when transferred to marble.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art