Winter

Jean Antoine Houdon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A frileuse is a woman subject to cold. A marble version (Musée Fabre, Montpellier), dated 1783, was originally intended as an allegory of Winter. For the Museum's bronze, cast by Houdon himself and coming from the collection of the duc d'Orléans, Houdon stripped the spiraling columnar composition to its bare essentials. The girl's tremulous flesh is offset by her tightly drawn shawl, elegant but hardly adequate.

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