Pierre-René Chodieu

By the late eighteenth century, the medal was an established commemorative medium, but sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Angers enlivened it by making over five hundred medallions in high relief, single-sided, and larger in scale than usual. In 1827 David d’Angers began a series of works that portrayed almost all of the notable men and women of his day. First he would sketch the sitter from life in wax, then make the finished portrait in plaster, which would serve as the model to be cast in bronze. The works from this series on view in The Critique of Reason illustrate the different stages of that process: The arresting wax of the politician Pierre-René Choudieu, shown here, displays the sculptor’s mastery in hacking out the sitter’s features. David d’Angers created the series without a commission; even though Parisian founders commercially exploited his medallions later, he did not gain financial benefit from their reproductions.