TitleRobert Fulton
Date1803
MediumPainted plaster
DimensionsOverall: 28 3/4 × 19 × 11 in.
SignedSigned under right shoulder: "houdon an XII"
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Purchased from the American Academy of Fine Arts, 1842
Object number55-S
Label TextAlthough he is chiefly remembered for his work on the steamboat he launched on the Hudson River in 1807, Robert Fulton (1765-1815) began his professional career as a painter of miniature portraits and landscapes. After apprenticing in Philadelphia, he left in 1786 for England, where he studied under Benjamin West. He settled there, increasingly applying himself to mechanical engineering, and did not return to America until 1806. He visited Paris in 1797 to promote his ideas for several inventions, including a submarine torpedo boat. But neither the French government nor, later, the British government was receptive. Fortunately he became a friend of Joel Barlow, whose financial support helped him continue his work. It is therefore appropriate that the two friends should have sat for Houdon at the same time in 1803, the same year Fulton conducted two experiments with small steamboats on the Seine in Paris. Fulton's biographer H. W. Dickinson called the Houdon bust "the best likeness extant."Like the Academy's Houdon bust of John Paul Jones, that of Fulton was copied several times. Herbert Adams supervised one of these projects in 1909, at the time of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, when The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in conjunction with the National Society of the Colonial Dames in America, was authorized to make six bronze casts and one plaster from a mold taken from the Academy's bust. Bronzes were to be presented to The Metropolitan Museum, the American Numismatic Society, the Colonial Dames, the College of the City of New York, the New-York Historical Society, and the National Academy of Design. The plaster was a gift to Mrs. Arthur Taylor Sutcliff, Fulton's great-granddaughter. In 1924 the Academy presented another plaster copy to the Lancaster County Historical Society, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Charles Henry Hart and Edward Biddle erroneously wrote that the Academy's bust of Fulton was cast from an example in the Musée de Marine, Paris, now thought to be a twentieth-century copy. Academy minutes record that its seal was applied in 1909, probably to assure identifying the bust as the property of the Academy at the time the copies were made.
Collections
- 19th Century Highlights from the Collection
1803
