Voltaire assis

Voltaire (1694-1778) returned from Ferney to Paris in February 1778, where his niece, Mme Denis Duvivier, commissioned Houdon to create a larger-than-life seated statue for the Académie Française (now in the Comédie Française; repeated in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg). At the Salon in 1779, Houdon showed this Voltaire, bareheaded and in a «manteau de chambre», in two small bronzes for Catherine the Great. The present example of the numerous existing reductions is close to the version that reached the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam from St. Petersburg. The previous owners were probably Prince Friedrich Karl August von Waldeck-Pyrmont (r. 1763-1812) and the well-known Zurich man of letters Heinrich (Henri) Meister (1744-1826), who was acquainted with Voltaire and edited the «Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique» in Paris from 1773 to 1792. Source