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. Falguiere’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 Moliere, Diderot, Washington, Franklin, and Mirabeau, his unequalled statue of Voltaire in the foyer of the Francais 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 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.