and to
Pere-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 i