Life mask of the Marquis de Lafayette

The gifted portrait sculptor Houdon produced a gallery of great European and American philosophers and statesmen. His uncanny ability to capture their dignity and inner life was due in large part to his practice of taking life casts from the heads of his sitters. This accords with Pliny’s account of Lysistratus of Sicyon as the first artist to take a plaster mold “from the living face itself” (35.153), resulting in a more faithful likeness of the subject.

Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roche-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834), took up the cause of the American Revolution at nineteen, becoming one of George Washington’s most trusted generals. In gratitude for Lafayette’s victory over the British at Yorktown in 1781, the Virginia legislature commissioned Houdon to create a bust of Lafayette, eventually given to the city of Paris. This plaster life mask was the starting point for various finished busts of Lafayette, both in marble and in painted plaster. Despite the obvious fidelity to Lafayette’s features captured by the life mask, it is important to note that Houdon has already altered and idealized this cast, for example imparting a far-seeing, noble gaze to the sitter.

(Andrew C. Weislogel, “Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder,” exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and Verity J. Platt, presented at the Johnson Museum January 21–June 11, 2023)