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Houzeau, Jacques
(b Bar-le-Duc, Meuse, 1624; d Paris, 18 May 1691). French sculptor. A member of the Académie de St Luc from 1646, he attracted the attention of the architect Louis Le Vau who in 1656 appointed him Sculpteur du Roi. Although he also worked for private clients such as Nicolas Fouquet at the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, Seine-et-Marne (1659–60), he was principally employed by the Bâtiments du Roi. He executed numerous decorative sculptures at the château of Vincennes, Val-de-Marne (1656–60; 1667–70), and at the Tuileries Palace, Paris (1667–70), but his largest body of work was for the château of Versailles where he was a very productive member of the team of sculptors assembled by Charles Le Brun to execute his designs for the embellishment of Louis XIV’s park and palace. Among Houzeau’s surviving works at Versailles are a pair of marble Sphinxes on the Parterre des Fleurs (1667–8), his cheerful statues of Momus and Terpsichore (stone, 1671) for the façade, fragments of the lively, naturalistic animal fountains of the Labyrinthe (lead, 1673–4), a powerful statue of a male nude representing the Choleric Temperament (marble, 1677–80), a truculent Faun shaped as a term (1684–7) and two dramatic bronze groups representing Animal Fights (1685–7). Houzeau was the brother-in-law of the sculptor Etienne Le Hongre.
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