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 aestheticism, 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, exterioriser nos idees et nos ames.  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