After Goujon, Clodion is the great name in French sculpture, until we
come to Houdon, who may almost be assigned to the nineteenth century.
There were throughout the eighteenth century honorable artists,
sculptors of distinction beyond contest. But sculpture is such an
abstract art itself that the sculpture which partook of the
artificiality of the eighteenth century has less interest for us, less
that is concrete and appealing than even the painting of the epoch. It
derived its canons and its practice from Puget--the French Bernini, who
with less grace and less dilettante extravagance than his Italian
exemplar had more force and solidity. With less cleverness, less
charm--for Bernini, spite of the disesteem in which his juxtaposition to
Michael Angelo and his apparent unconsciousness of the attitude such
juxtaposition should have imposed upon him, cause him to be held, has a
great deal of charm and is extraordinarily clever--he is more sincere,
more thorough-going, more respectable. Coysevox is chiefly Puget
exaggerated, and his pupil, Coustou, who comes down to nearly the middle
of the eighteenth century, contributed nothing to French sculptural
tradition.
But Clodion is a distinct break. He is as different from Coysevox and
Coustou as Watteau is from Lebrun. He is the essence of what we mean by
Louis Quinze. His work is clever beyond characterization. It has in
perfection what sculptors mean by color--that is to say a certain warmth
of feeling, a certain _insouciance_, a brave carelessness for
sculpturesque traditions, a free play of fancy, both in the conception
and execution of his subjects. Like the Louis Quinze painters, he has
his thoughtless, irresponsible, involuntary side, and like them--like
the best of them, that is to say, like Watteau--he is never quite as
good as he could be. He seems not so much concerned at expressing his
ideal as at pleasing, and pleasing people of too frivolous an
appreciation to call forth what is best in him. He devoted himself
almost altogether to terra-cotta, which is equivalent to saying that the
exquisite and not the impressive was his aim. Thoroughly classic, so far
as the avoidance of everything naturalistic is concerned, he is yet as
little severe and correct as the painters of his day. He spent nine
years in Rome, but though enamoured in the most sympathetic degree of
the antique, it was the statuettes and figurines, the gay and social,
the elegant and decorative side of antique sculpture that exclusively he
delighted in. His work is Tanagra Gallicized. It is not the group of
"The Deluge," or the "Entry of the French into Munich," or "Hercules in
Repose," for which he was esteemed by contemporaries or is prized by
posterity. He is admirable where he is inimitable--that is to say, in
the delightful decoration of which he was so prodigal. It is not in his
compositions essaying what is usually meant by sculptural effect, but in
his vases, clocks, pendants, volutes, little reliefs of nymphs riding
dolphins over favoring breakers and amid hospitable foam, his toilettes
of Venus, his façade ornamentations, his applied sculpture, in a word,
that his true talent lies. After him it is natural that we should have a
reversion to quasi-severity and imitation of the antique--just as David
succeeded to the Louis Quinze pictorial riot--and that the French
contemporaries of Canova and Thorwaldsen, those literal, though
enthusiastic illustrators of Winckelmann's theories, should be Pradier
and Etex and the so-called Greek school. Pradier's Greek inspiration has
something Swiss about it, one may say--he was a Genevan--though his
figures were simple and largely treated. He had a keen sense for the
feminine element--the _ewig Weibliche_--and expressed it plastically
with a zest approaching gusto. Yet his statues are women rather than
statues, and, more than that, are handsome rather than beautiful. Etex,
it is to be feared, will be chiefly remembered as the unfortunately
successful rival of Rude in the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile decoration.
V
Having in each case more or less relation with, but really wholly
outside of and superior to all "schools" whatever--except the school of
nature, which permits as much freedom as it exacts fidelity--is the
succession of the greatest of French sculptors since the Renaissance and
down to the present day: Houdon, David d'Angers, Rude, Carpeaux, and
Barye. Houdon is one of the finest examples of the union of vigor with
grace. He will be known chiefly as a portraitist, but such a masterpiece
as his "Diana" shows how admirable he was in the sphere of purely
imaginative theme and treatment. Classic, and even conventionally
classic as it is, both in subject and in the way the subject is
handled--compared for example with M. Falguière's "Nymph Hunting," which
is simply a realistic Diana--it is designed and modelled with as much
personal freedom and feeling as if Houdon had been stimulated by the
ambition of novel accomplishment, instead of that of rendering with
truth and grace a time-honored and traditional sculptural motive. Its
treatment is beautifully educated and its effect refined, chaste, and
elevated in an extraordinary degree. No master ever steered so near the
reef of "clock-tops," one may say, and avoided it so surely and
triumphantly. The figure is light as air and wholly effortless at the
same time. There has rarely been such a distinguished success in
circumventing the great difficulty of sculpture--which is to rob marble
or metal of its specific gravity and make it appear light and buoyant,
just as the difficulty of the painter is to give weight and substance to
his fictions. But Houdon's admirable busts of Molière, Diderot,
Washington, Franklin, and Mirabeau, his unequalled statue of Voltaire in
the _foyer_ of the Français and his San Bruno in Santa Maria degli
Angeli at Rome are the works on which his fame will chiefly rest, and,
owing to their masterly combination of strength with style, rest
securely.
To see the work of David d'Angers, one must go to Angers itself and to
Père-Lachaise. The Louvre is lamentably lacking in anything truly
representative of this most eminent of all portraitists in sculpture, I
think, not excepting even Houdon, if one may reckon the mass as well as
the excellence of his remarkable production and the way in which it
witnesses that portraiture is just what he was born to do. The
"Philopoemen" of the Louvre is a fine work, even impressively large and
simple. But it is the competent work of a member of a school and leaves
one a little cold. Its academic quality quite overshadows whatever
personal feeling one may by searching find in the severity of its
treatment and the way in which a classic motive has been followed out
naturally and genuinely instead of perfunctorily. It gives no intimation
of the faculty that produced the splendid gallery of medallions
accentuated by an occasional bust and statue, of David's celebrated
contemporaries and quasi-contemporaries in every field of distinction.
It is impossible to overestimate the interest and value, the truth and
the art of these. Whether the subject be intractable or not seems to
have made no difference to David. He invariably produced a work of art
at the same time that he expressed the character of its motive with
uncompromising fidelity. His portraits, moreover, are pure sculpture.
There is nothing of the cameo-cutter's art about them. They are modelled
not carved. The outline is no more important than it is in nature, so
far as it is employed to the end of identification. It is used
decoratively. There are surprising effects of fore-shortening,
exhibiting superb, and as it were unconscious ease in handling
relief--that most difficult of illusions in respect of having no law (at
least no law that it is worth the sculptor's while to try to discover)
of correspondence to reality. Forms and masses have a definition and a
firmness wholly remarkable in their independence of the usual low
relief's reliance on pictorial and purely linear design. They do not
blend picturesquely with the background, and do not depend on their
suggestiveness for their character. They are always realized,
executed--sculpture in a word whose suggestiveness, quite as potent as
that of feebler executants, begins only when actual representation has
been triumphantly achieved instead of impotently and skilfully avoided.
Of Rude's genius one's first thought is of its robustness, its
originality. Everything he did is stamped with the impress of his
personality. At the same time it is equally evident that Rude's own
temperament took its color from the transitional epoch in which he
lived, and of which he was _par excellence_ the sculptor. He was the
true inheritor of his Burgundian traditions. His strongest side was that
which allies him with his artistic ancestor, Claux Sluters. But he
lived in an era of general culture and æstheticism, and all his
naturalistic tendencies were complicated with theory. He accepted the
antique not merely as a stimulus, but as a model. He was not only a
sculptor but a teacher, and the formulation of his didacticism
complicated considerably the free exercise of his expression. At the
last, as is perhaps natural, he reverted to precedent and formulary, and
in his "Hebe and the Eagle of Jupiter" and his "L'Amour Dominateur du
Monde," is more at variance than anywhere else with his native instinct,
which was, to cite the admirable phrase of M. de Fourcaud, _extérioriser
nos idées et nos âmes_. But throughout his life he halted a little
between two opinions--the current admiration of the classic, and his own
instinctive feeling for nature unsystematized and unsophisticated. His
"Jeanne d'Arc" is an instance. In spite of the violation of tradition,
which at the time it was thought to be, it seems to-day to our eyes to
err on the side of the conventional. It is surely intellectual, classic,
even factitious in conception as well as in execution. In some of its
accessories it is even modish. It illustrates not merely the abstract
turn of conceiving a subject which Rude always shared with the great
classicists of his art, but also the arbitrariness of treatment against
which he always protested. Without at all knowing it, he was in a very
intimate sense an eclectic in many of his works. He believed in forming
a complete mental conception of every composition before even posing a
model, as he used to tell his students, but in complicated compositions
this was impossible, and he had small talent for artificial composition.
Furthermore, he often distrusted--quite without reason, but after the
fatal manner of the rustic--his own intuitions. But one mentions these
qualifications of his genius and accomplishment only because both his
genius and accomplishment are so distinguished as to make one wish they
were more nearly perfect than they are. It is really idle to wish that
Rude had neglected the philosophy of his art, with which he was so much
occupied, and had devoted himself exclusively to treating sculptural
subjects in the manner of a nineteenth century successor of Sluters and
Anthoniet. He might have been a greater sculptor than he was, but he is
sufficiently great as he is. If his "Mercury" is an essay in
conventional sculpture, his "Petit Pêcheur" is frank and free sculptural
handling of natural material. His work at Lille and in Belgium, his
reclining figure of Cavaignac in the cemetery of Montmartre, his noble
figures of Gaspard Monge at Beaune, of Marshal Bertrand, and of Ney, are
all cast in the heroic mould, full of character, and in no wise
dependent on speculative theory. Few sculptors have displayed anything
like his variety and range, which extends, for example, from the
"Baptism of Christ" to a statue of "Louis XIII. enfant," and includes
portraits, groups, compositions in relief, and heroic statues. In all
his successful work one cannot fail to note the force and fire of the
man's personality, and perhaps what one thinks of chiefly in connection
with him is the misfortune which we owe to the vacillation of M. Thiers
of having but one instead of four groups by him on the piers of the Arc
de Triomphe de l'Étoile. Carpeaux used to say that he never passed the
"Chant du Départ" without taking off his hat. One can understand his
feeling. No one can have any appreciation of what sculpture is without
perceiving that this magnificent group easily and serenely takes its
rank among the masterpieces of sculpture of all time. It is, in the
first place, the incarnation of an abstraction, the spirit of patriotism
roused to the highest pitch of warlike intensity and self-sacrifice, and
in the second this abstract motive is expressed in the most elaborate
and comprehensive completeness--with a combined intricacy of detail and
singleness of effect which must be the despair of any but a master in
sculpture.