Pierre-Eugène-Émile Hébert specialized in memorial sculptures and portraits of great men. Throughout a successful career, Hébert exhibited at the Salon many times until his death in 1893. Remarkable for its grand dimensions, this terra-cotta portrait pays homage to Honoré de Balzac’s immense literary prestige and physical presence. Hébert cleverly combined a monumental quality with a sense of the sitter’s intellectual agility—a sharp sideways glance and faint smile express the character of this writer, an ironic observer of his contemporaries.