Joel Barlow

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TitleJoel Barlow

Date1803

MediumPlaster

DimensionsOverall: 28 × 19 3/4 × 11 in.

Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY, Purchased from the American Academy of Fine Arts, 1842

Object number57-S

Label TextHoudon modeled the bust of Joel Barlow in 1803, the twelfth year of the French Republic (hence, "an XII"), and at the same time that he was doing his bust of the engineer and artist Robert Fulton. Both portraits were shown in the Salon of 1804 and had possibly been conceived as pendants. The Houdon scholar H. H. Arnason wrote that the inclusion of Barlow's name and age on the bust is quite unusual and may have been specified by the sitter.
Barlow (1754-1812) began his adult life in the arts, becoming a poet of some renown in the young and almost poet-less America with his best-seller, The Vision of Columbus (1787). This was later expanded into the epic-length Columbiad, a project on which he was working when he sat for Houdon. Like Fulton, Barlow coupled his artistic interests with a more economically secure career, serving in the diplomatic corps in Paris, Algiers, and Warsaw. He died of pneumonia in Poland.
The Academy's bust of Barlow was among the collection of casts assembled by the American Academy of Fine Arts, New York, and purchased by the National Academy of Design in 1842. How it came to the American Academy and its history prior to that are not known. But the Houdon scholar H. H. Arnason believed that the Academy's bust, as well as those at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and the New-York Historical Society, all were cast from a marble version-either the one formerly in the collection of the Barlow family and now in the White House, Washington, D.C., or the one ordered by John Paul Jones from Houdon's studio and now unlocated.