Born in Versailles, France, Jean-Antoine Houdon began sculpting at a young age and began his training at the École royale des élèves protégés, where his father was the caretaker. Young Houdon studied with Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne and René-Michel Slodtz, and competed for the Prix de Rome in 1756, which he won in 1761. He lived in Rome from 1764–68, where he employed anatomical studies to create one of his best-known sculptures, L'Ecorché (the flayed man) in 1767; he produced a large marble statue of St. Bruno the same year.

He returned to Paris in 1768, and two years later, presented a reclining figure, Morpheus, as his reception piece for membership in the Académie Royale. He was accepted by the Académie in 1771, and became a full member in 1777. Houdon went on to portray many of the key figures of the Enlightenment. In addition to George Washington, his sitters included Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Frédéric Melchior Grimm, Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, the Marquis de Lafayette, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Houdon’s portrait busts of these subjects –produced in plaster, terracotta, and marble—exhibit a remarkable degree of technical mastery. These portrait busts won acclaim for their extraordinary verisimilitude-- sometimes aided by the use of either life or death masks of his subjects—and for expression or gestures which adroitly conveyed the personality of the subjects. In 1786 he married Marie-Ange Langlois, and the couple had three daughters. Houdon began to teach at the Académie royale in 1792, and at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1805, and in 1809 he received the Légion d’Honneur.