Organized in the US by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Gallery of Art, this exhibition brought together for the first time over 70 portrait sculptures by Jean-Antoine Houdon, probably the greatest portrait sculptor of the 18th century. The Web version of the exhibition presents two sculptures that can be rotated and viewed in the round (portrait of Marie-Sébastien-Charles-François Fontaine de Biré, treasurer general under Louis XVI and Le Baiser donné, or The Kiss Given -- privately owned and loaned for the exhibition). The link to Houdon's Sitters and Subjects reveals images of Houdon's portraits of prominent Americans such as Robert Fulton (inventor of the steamboat) and Benjamin Franklin, as well French Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte and philosopher Jean-Jacque Rousseu. Also worth a look is the interactive version of Louis-Leopold Boilly's 1803-04 painting _Houdon in His Studio_ where clicking images surrounding the painting locates each image in the artist's studio. This area of the site also reveals intersting information such as the fact that the 1789 portrait of Thomas Jefferson (now owned by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston) was selected in 1938 for the nickel and is still in circulation today.
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