L’Ecorche (Figure of a Flayed Man, Right Arm Extended Horizontally)

by Anne L. Poulet in Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment by Anne L. Poulet
with Guilhem Scherf, Ulrike D. Mathies, Christoph Frank, Claude Vandalle, Dean Walker, Monique Barbier published by The National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with the University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London

Houdon’s figure of an Ecorché is one of his earliest, most famous, and most widely reproduced works. The twenty-five- year-old sculptor first executed a life-size figure of a flayed man as a preparatory study for his statue of Saint John the Baptist, commissioned in 1766 by Dom Andre Le Masson, the French procuréur général of the Carthusian order of friars in Rome for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. He was already deeply interested in the study of human anatomy when he received the commission. One of his friends, the German artist Johann Christian von Mannlich, who was a visiting pensionnaire at the Academie de France in Rome, recounts in his memoirs: “At dawn, my neighbor and friend Houdon came to get me to go to Saint-Louis des Francais where M. Seguier, professor of surgery, gave us a lesson in anatomy on cadavers for which the king paid. We were the only people from tire academy to follow this course, and we profited all the more for it.” Mannlich goes on to say that Houdon was doing a statue of Saint’John the Baptist at this time and that he had “the idea to do the model in clay... first as an écorché, and every day he used our [anatomy] lesson and my drawings in order to study the system of muscles thoroughly. This work had the complete approval of M. Seguier, who often came to see it, making observations and criticisms. It also had [the approval] of all the artists and amateurs who urged Houdon to have a mold made of his ecorche before he transformed it into a Saint John, and they judged it to be the best anatomical statue ever to have been created.” That the Ecorché was immediately recognized as an important work of art in its own right and one that would be useful for study in art academies is echoed by Charles Natoire, director of the Academie de France in Rome, in a letter of early 1767. The sculpture quickly became a key work in the academy’s plaster collection. By 1775 Vien, who succeeded Natoire as director of the academy, included as part of the rules he wrote for the students’ curriculum, “One will learn anatomy from the study of the écorché that M. Houdon made for the academy.”

Already in this youthful work several of tire dominant char­acteristics of Houdon’s mature style are evident. His preoccu­pation with the accurate observation and depiction of the bones and muscles as well as the exterior surface of the human body eventually led him to use life and death masks for his closely observed portraits. At the same time, he transformed his stud­ies of stiff, dissected corpses into an animated, graceful figure of classical proportions. This blend of an almost scientific recording of nature with its abstraction and idealization is explained by Houdon in a letter of July 1772 written to Ernst II of Saxe-Gotha, to whom he was sending a plaster cast of the Ecorche:

If some skilled surgeons find something with which to find fault in this work, I wouldn’t be surprised, in spite of the fact that all those to whom I showed it in Rome as well as here seemed to me to be very satisfied. The few whom 1 forced to find something to criticize about it, persuaded that men do not all see alike, said to me that they wanted a certain thing in such and such an area. But... I had done this work to teach artists, which is the reason for the correction of the design—Sur­geons, as skilled as they may be, are not artists, and artists are not surgeons. In my view the skilled surgeon must study after nature, as defective as one may find it to be, in order to be able to treat ever) infirmity. But we [artists] must study it differently. It is nature in all her nobility, her perfect state of health, that we are looking for, or if not, we are nothing but wretched imitators.

Houdon was also aware of the long tradition of sculptors’ rep­resentations of flayed figures, and he consciously set out to compete with them. There was a growing interest in the study of anatomy among artists in Paris in the 1750s. M. Sue, asso­ciate professor of anatomy and a central influence in this trend, began teaching a course for artists in 1755. The sculptors Jean-Baptiste Pigalle and Guillaume Coustou were among his stu­dents. Houdon would also have known Edme Bouchardon's illustrations of an ecorche for L'Anatomie necessaire pour I’usage chi dessein, engraved by Jacques-Gabriel Huquier and first pub­lished in 1741.

In the present Ecorché it is evident that Houdon was plan­ning to do his statue of Saint John the Baptist in marble, as he included a tree trunk that would be necessary to support the weight of the figure in marble or stone. Following the enthusi­astic reception of the sculpture by his professors and colleagues, he seized the opportunity to duplicate and sell his Ecorche, begin­ning at the Academie de France in Rome. Once he returned to Paris and began to distribute the work, he eliminated the tree trunk, as it was not needed to support the lighter-weight figure when executed in plaster or in bronze.

The Ecorché is an early example of Houdon’s self-interested, entrepreneurial temperament. In an unpublished letter of 13 February 1776 the sculptor proudly wrote of the enthusiastic reception this youthful work had met. His motives in promoting it seem to have been in part didactic, as he believed his sculpture was an ideal figure from which art and medical stu­dents could study anatomy a belief that has been borne out by its enduring popularity. He also saw that reproducing the sculp­ture in plaster would both enhance his reputation and bring him a substantial income. He was to continue this practice of making and selling plaster casts of his sculptures throughout his career. Listed in the sale held after Houdon's death in 1828 (see Related Works) was the plaster mold for the large Ecorché. The catalogue specifies that the acquisition of the mold would transfer ownership of the figure to the buyer. Thus the work continued to be reproduced after Houdon’s lifetime.



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