Portrait of Christoph Willibald Gluck (c. 1775): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Christoph Willibald Gluck (c. 1775) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jean-Antoine Houdon (French, 1741–1828).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

A well-known composer of the 1700s, Gluck reformed opera by bringing unprecedented simplicity and sincerity to his music and staging, qualities shared by Houdon’s bust. This portrait, by depicting Gluck’s pockmarked face, was perceived as a natural and truthful representation. Yet, he would never have appeared publicly with unkempt hair and an open collar, which constituted the standard for representing an artist.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Christoph Willibald Gluck
• Date: c. 1775
• Creator attribution: Jean-Antoine Houdon (French, 1741–1828)
• Culture: France
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: terracotta
• Dimensions: Overall: 49.5 x 40 x 28.5 cm (19 1/2 x 15 3/4 x 11 1/4 in.); with base: 64 x 39.3 x 28.1 cm (25 3/16 x 15 1/2 x 11 1/16 in.)
• Collection: Sculpture
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1988.59

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• "The Year in Review for 1988." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 76, no. 2 (1989): 30-75.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.