Houdon spent his early years in the company of the artists at the École Royale des Elèves Protégés, the training institution for the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. The young artists who excelled there went to Rome (as recipients of the Prix de Rome) to study the art of classical antiquity and the Renaissance and Baroque masters. Houdon studied in Paris with the sculptors René-Michel Slodtz (aka Michel-Ange Slodtz, 1705-1764) and Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. Houdon won the Prix de Rome in 1761 and left for Rome in 1764. There he made a number of sculptures inspired by the masters, as well as a large marble statue of 'St. Bruno' for Santa Maria degli Angeli (1767, still in that church).

In the early 1770s, Houdon made two trips to Gotha in the Saxony part of Germany where Herzog von Saxe-Gotha and his wife, Maria Charlotte, became his important patrons. Houdon sculpted profile medallion portraits of them which he exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1773. He continued to produce many portrait busts of important aristocrats and French revolutionaries. He earned a reputation for his works.

In 1776 he made a large plaster statue of 'Diana the Huntress' (Gotha, Schloss Friedenstein) for Herzog von Saxe-Gotha. There are other large-scale versions of the statue, of which two are in America: a 75-inch-tall terra-cotta (circa 1781, New York, Frick Collection) and bronze cast by Houdon himself (1782, San Marino, CA, Huntington Gallery). Many of Houdon's earlier works (made in Rome) are now preserved at the Herzon von Saxe-Gotha family's castle, Schloss Friedenstein. (The descendants of this Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty are the British royal family, the Windsors).

Then followed busts and statues of Voltaire, Rousseau, Molière, Benjamin Franklin (1779), and the Maréchal de Tourville (1781, Versailles, Chateau). In many of his sculptures of contemporary luminaries, Houdon dressed the figures in the costume of their day. Houdon came to America in 1785 at Thomas Jefferson's request, to make a monumental sculpture of George Washington for the U.S. Capitol, then in Richmond, VA. Houdon proposed an equestrian statue in a classical Greek or Roman style. Washington rejected the idea as too imperial. Houdon sculpted Washington as a standing figure in 1788 and made a bust of Thomas Jefferson (1789).