With considerably less force than M. Dubois and decidedly less piquancy than M. Saint-Marceaux, M. Antonin Mercie has perhaps greater refinement than either.  His outline is a trifle softer, his sentiment more gracious, more suave.  His work is difficult to characterize satisfactorily, and the fact may of course proceed from its lack of force, as well as from the well-understood difficulty of translating into epithets anything so essentially elusive as suavity and grace of form.  At one epoch in any examination of academic French sculpture that of M. Mercie seems the most interesting; it is so free from exaggeration of any kind on the one hand, it realizes its idea so satisfactorily on the other, and this idea is so agreeable, so refined, and at the same time so dignified.  The “David” is an early work now in the Luxembourg gallery, reproductions of which are very popular, and the reader may judge how well it justifies these remarks.  Being an early work, one cannot perhaps insist on its originality; in France, a young sculptor must be original at his peril; his education is so complete, he must have known and studied the beauties of classic sculpture so thoroughly, that not to be impressed by them so profoundly as to display his appreciativeness in his first work is apt to argue a certain insensitiveness.  And every one cannot have creative genius.  What a number of admirable works we should be compelled to forego if creative genius were demanded of an artist of the present day when the best minds of the time are occupied with other things than art!  One is apt to forget that in our day the minds that correspond with the artistic miracles of the Renaissance are absorbed in quite different departments of effort.  M. Mercie’s “David” would perhaps never have existed but for Donatello’s.  As far as plastic motive is concerned, it may without injustice be called a variant of that admirable creation, and from every point of view except that of dramatic grace it is markedly inferior to its inspiration; as an embodiment of triumphant youth, of the divine ease with which mere force is overcome, it has only a superficial resemblance to the original.

But if with M. Mercie “David” was simply a classic theme to be treated, which is exactly what it of course was not with Donatello, it is undeniable that he has expressed himself very distinctly in his treatment.  A less sensitive artist would have vulgarized instead of merely varying the conception, whereas one can easily see in M. Mercie’s handling of it the ease, science, and felicitous movement that have since expressed themselves more markedly, more positively, but hardly more unmistakably, in the sculptor’s maturer works.  Of these the chief is perhaps the “Gloria Victis,” which now decorates the Square Montholon; and its identity of authorship with the “David” is apparent in spite of its structural complexity and its far greater importance both in subject and execution.  Its subject is the most inspiring that a French sculptor since the