Using Jean-Antoine Houdon’s sculptures at the Art Institute, Malcolm Baker of the University of California Riverside examines the relationship between original and copy in portrait art, where replication is sometimes a virtue of the technique. Baker also explores the central place sculpture had during the eighteenth century.

Baker is the author of Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument, which was co-authored with David Bindman and awarded the 1996 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art. He is also the author of Figured in Marble: the Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture.