3-083-355 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Robert Fulton, c1804. Houdon, the greatest French neoclassical portrait sculptor, has captured the American inventor's complex character - iintelligent, self-assured, energetic, and sensitive, qualified perhaps by the merest trace of discouragement, reflecting the problems with his imperfect experiments, thus far, with submarines and steam-powered ships attempted off the French coast. Fulton's strikingly handsome appearance is reinforced by his austere yet elegant French attire and fashionable hair style. He was thirty-eight, an American living in Paris, when he posed for the celebrated French sculptor.