A good quality and finely carved late C18th classical grand Tour marble bust of Diana, with her head turned to dexter and her hair tied up with a fastener in the form of a cresent moon, below showing her bare chest. On a turned socle base with stuff leaf carving. In very good condition. Circa 1780. Signed by renowned neo-classical sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon.
Among being goddess of the moon she is also goddess to the hunt, crossroads, countryside and childbirth.
Born in Versailles, on 20 March 1741, Houdon was a French neoclassical sculptor, famous for his portrait busts and statues of philosophers, inventors and political figures of the Enlightenment. Houdon's subjects included Denis Diderot (1771), Benjamin Franklin (1778-1809), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1778), Voltaire (1781), Molière (1781), George Washington (1785–1788), Thomas Jefferson (1789), Louis XVI (1790), Robert Fulton (1803–04), and Napoléon Bonaparte (1806).
H: 61 cm (25")
W: 35 cm (13 3/4")
D: 22 cm (8 11/16")