Chapter 20　On a Stamp

When I was a boy, I collected stamps. Now I'm grown up but I still have the stamps I collected, and I still like to get new ones to put in my album.

If you collect stamps, you may have one with a side view, or profile, of George Washington's head. This profile of Washington was first used on postage stamps in 1851.It has been used on several issues of ordinary United States postage stamps since then.

All these profile pictures on stamps were made from a bust of Washington. The bust itself was made by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon.Houdon went to Mount Vernon, Washington's home in Virginia, and stayed with Washington until he had made the bust that the portrait on the stamp is copied from.

An expert at making realistic-looking busts, Houdon was one of the best sculptors France had had for two hundred years. When he was a boy, he studied art in Paris, and when he was twenty, he won a prize for sculpture.The prize gave him enough money to study art in Italy for four years, so he went to Italy.He liked Italy and stayed there ten years instead of four.Then he came back to France.Isn't it interesting how many artists went to Italy to study art and how many stayed on longer than they had planned?

Houdon said he believed that a sculptor should try to make true likenesses of men who had brought glory and honor to their country so that people would always know what these men looked like. Houdon became just as successful at making portrait statues as the