Rude, François

(b Dijon, 4 Jan 1784; d Paris, 3 Nov 1855).
French sculptor. He was of working-class origins and Neo-classical training. After 1830, he identified with the emergent group of Romantic sculptors in France, at the same time retaining his own strong sense of monumentalism. His massive stone relief on the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, popularly known as ‘La Marseillaise’ (1833–6), and his bronze allegory Napoleon Awakening to Immortality (1845–7; Fixin, Parc Noisot; are memorable nostalgic celebrations of the military heroism of the Revolutionary period.

1. Training in France and exile in Belgium, to 1827.
2. Paris, 1827–c 1845.
3. Late career, after c 1845.

1. Training in France and exile in Belgium, to 1827.

Rude was the son of a Dijon stove maker and locksmith who supported the aims of the French Revolution to the extent of enrolling his infant son, in 1793, in one of the juvenile battalions known punningly as ‘Les Royals Bonbons’. François was early apprenticed to his father, but his interest in art was awakened in 1800, when he attended a prize-giving ceremony at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon. François Devosges, founder and director of this regional school, subsequently persuaded Rude’s father to allow his son to attend its courses in his spare time. After four years of such study, François Rude received his first commission, from a local tax inspector, Louis Frémiet, for a bust (untraced) of a relative, the engraver Louis-Gabriel Monnier (1733–1804). Rude was adopted by the Frémiet family after the death of his father in 1805, and in 1807 he left for Paris, taking with him an introduction to the Director of the Musée Napoléon, Baron Vivant Denon.

With Denon’s backing, Rude entered the studio of the decorative sculptor Edme Gaulle (1762–1841), collaborating with him on reliefs for the Colonne de la Grande Armée in the Place Vendôme, Paris. He left Gaulle after less than a year to become a pupil of a more respected sculptor, Pierre Cartellier. In 1809, he was competing at the École des Beaux-Arts, finally winning the Prix de Rome in 1812. Two of his preliminary competition entries survive, a Marius Meditating on the Ruins of Carthage (plaster, 1809; Dijon, Musée B.-A.) and a tête d’expression, Expectation Mingled with Fear (plaster, 1812; Paris, École N. Sup. B.-A.). The original plaster of his successful Prix de Rome entry, Aristeus Mourning the Loss of his Bees, an exercise in bucolic mythology, was later destroyed by the artist but survives in a bronze cast (Dijon, Musée B.-A.).

The financial plight of the Académie de France in Rome prevented Rude from taking up his scholarship, so he returned to the Frémiet family home in Dijon. After the Hundred Days in 1815, however, Louis Frémiet found himself compromised by his Bonapartist activities, and he took his family into exile in Brussels, followed by Rude, who remained there until 1827.

The 12 years Rude spent in Brussels were on the whole fallow. He did however, find work with the royal architect Charles van der Straeten (1771–1834), through the introduction of the exiled Neo-classical painter Jacques-Louis David, the cultural lodestar of the French expatriot community in Brussels. Sophie Frémiet (1797–1861), whom Rude was to wed in 1821, was David’s pupil and copyist. The most ambitious of the resulting projects for van der Straeten was the decoration executed in 1823–4 for the hunting lodge of the Prince of Orange at Tervueren. This consisted of eight panels illustrating the Exploits of Achilles and a stone frieze of the Hunt of Meleager (all destroyed; plaster casts, Dijon, Musée B.-A.). Their composition is austerely classical, enlivened by some passages of distinctive anatomical observation. The sculptural decorations that Rude contributed in 1824–5 to a wooden pulpit for the church of St Etienne, Lille, are equally circumscribed. Although he appears to have made no progress in imaginary sculpture throughout the Belgian period, Rude’s portrait busts from these years are impressively forthright naturalistic productions. The marble version of his William I of the Netherlands was destroyed in 1819, but a bronze version survives (Ghent, Musée S. Künst.). His portrait of Jacques-Louis David was first executed in 1826. A later marble version (Paris, Louvre) was exhibited at the Salon of 1831.

2. Paris, 1827–c 1845.

Encouraged by Antoine-Jean Gros, Rude returned to Paris in 1827. He was determined to vie with contemporaries who had already established reputations there, notably David d’Angers, Jean-Pierre Cortot and James Pradier. His two 1828 Salon exhibits were a thoroughly official statue of the Immaculate Virgin (plaster; Paris, SS Gervais et Protais) and a statue of Mercury Fastening his Sandal, also in plaster, which was only completed towards the end of the exhibition. The god is shown at the point of taking to the air after killing Argus, pausing to fasten his winged sandal. The influence on this of Giambologna’s famous statue of Mercury (c. 1580; Florence, Bargello) indicates a new flexibility in Rude’s attitude to sculptural tradition, and the critics immediately appreciated the sophisticated movement of his Mercury. A bronze version, exhibited at the Salon of 1834, is now in the Louvre, and a reduction, also in bronze, incorporating some additional features and commissioned by the journalist and government minister Adolphe Thiers, is now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon.

Like David d’Angers, Rude compromised his Republican convictions by accepting work on the monumental projects in Paris of the restored Bourbon regime. In 1829 he entered a competition for the pediment of the church of La Madeleine (drawing, Dijon Musée B.-A.), and in the same year he received a commission for part of the frieze for the Arc de Triomphe de L’Etoile, representing Charles X and the French Army. The plaster model for the frieze was completed, but the July Revolution of 1830 brought a halt to the work, and the model was probably destroyed in 1833.

Rude consolidated the popular success that he had won with his Mercury when he showed the plaster version of the Young Neapolitan Fisher boy Playing with a Tortoise at the 1831 Salon. Victor Schnetz and Léopold Robert had already created a vogue for Neapolitan figure subjects in painting during the 1820s. This genre, uniting Classical and Romantic features, was an ideal vehicle for artists seeking stylistic compromise and would continue to be popular with academic sculptors up to the 1860s. Rude’s capacity to produce in his Fisher boy an entirely plausible evocation of this modern arcadian world of contented physicality, though he had never visited Naples, shows to what extent this genre had already become an artistic convention. At the Salon of 1833, where Rude exhibited his marble version, the public could compare it with the equally well-received Neapolitan Fisher boy Dancing the Tarantella (Paris, Louvre) of François-Joseph Duret. Both could be considered an updating of the classical genre piece, but Rude’s naturalistic detail and humorous subject made his work the more distinctive new departure. The marble was purchased for the Musée du Luxembourg by Louis-Philippe (now Paris, Louvre).

In 1831, the newly installed regime of Louis-Philippe began a revised project of decoration for the Arc de Triomphe. The model for the Bourbon frieze having been abandoned, Rude was now commissioned for a section of the new one, showing the Return of Napoleon’s Armies from Egypt. In 1833, following the completion of this, he was requested by Thiers to produce a total program for the ‘trophies’ and capping of the arch. Surviving sketch models (examples in Paris, Louvre and Carnavalet) show that the idea of symbolic trophies had been replaced in Rude’s program by a series of historical allegories, summarizing the different phases of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. However, he finally received the commission for one only of the large stone reliefs. This has since been popularly baptized ‘La Marseillaise’, but its proper title is the Departure of the Volunteers in 1792. It is dominated by a flying female allegory of the Republic, who brandishes her sword while yelling encouragement to the Revolutionary armies. These are represented by six Gallic warriors, surging forward at her bidding, their racial origin indicated by rugged features and long hair rather than by their accoutrements of Classical armor and chain mail. Rude’s group, departing though it does from the formula adopted in the three companion reliefs by Jean-Pierre Cortot and Antoine Etex, which are all anchored by a static central figure, nonetheless combines processional and climactic features. Later in the century, it was to provide a powerful source of inspiration to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Rodin in their search for emotive effect in monumental compositions.

The Republican theme is not consistently pursued in Rude’s other works from this time. He, treated subjects from pre-Revolutionary history as in the marble statue of Maurice, Maréchal de Saxe (1836–8; Versailles, Château) and the silver statuette of the Adolescent Louis XIII (1840–42; Dampierre, Château), commissioned by Victor, Duc de Luynes. A Joan of Arc Listening to her Voices (marble, 1845–52) was originally part of the series of Great Women of France in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, but was moved in 1890 to the Louvre. The recently shorn head of the visionary shepherdess, and the inclusion of the sheep shears and clippings, bring a potentially ‘troubadour’ subject dramatically down to earth. In the field of devotional sculpture, Rude’s contribution was also far from negligible: from the Romantic pictorialism of his Baptism of Christ (marble, 1838–41; Paris, Madeleine), he progressed to a stark medievalism in his bronze Crucifixion group (1848–52) for the high altar of St Vincent de Paul, Paris, reminiscent of the 15th-century sculpture of his native Burgundy. On the other hand, his known Republican sympathies increasingly alienated him from the Orléans regime, just as his identification with the Romantic group of sculptors led him to desist from presenting his work at the Salon after 1838, in protest against the Salon juries’ rejection of the others. His candidature for membership of the Institut de France was persistently blocked, and although his teaching style won him a distinct following, with its stress on analytic naturalism, it was known to be of no assistance in gaining the Prix de Rome.

3. Late career, after c 1845.

During the late 1840s, Rude made his most personal profession of political alignment in two works: the tomb of the politician and writer Godefroi de Cavaignac (bronze, 1845–7; Paris, Montmartre Cemetery) and Napoleon Awakening to Immortality (bronze, 1845–7; Fixin, Parc Noisot). The first took the form of a draped, recumbent effigy of the dead man, holding a pen and a sword. The controversy aroused by this monument resulted in its not being inaugurated until 1856, and then without ceremony. The Napoleon was commissioned by a Captain Claude Noisot, a veteran of the Grande Armée, who was devoted to the cult of the Emperor. It was erected with considerable publicity in the patron’s picturesque hillside property to the south of Dijon. It is an original and naive popular allegory, representing the Emperor stirring out of his sleep on a rock emblematic of St Helena. The fetters of his captivity are in pieces, but his Imperial eagle is shown lying dead beyond recall. Despite this indication of Rude’s anti-Imperial sentiments, his most strident Bonapartist work, the bronze statue of Maréchal Michel Ney (Paris, Avenue de l’Observatoire), was inaugurated in 1853, shortly after the establishment of the Second Empire, though the Republican government in 1848 had initially confided the commission to him. Ney is represented brandishing his saber and shouting ‘Forward!’ to his troops. Further commemorations by Rude of subjects associated with the Napoleonic era are the bronze statues of Général Henri-Gatien Bertrand (1850–54; Châteauroux, Place Ste Hélène) and of Gaspard Monge (1846–9; Beaune, Place d’Armes).

As early as 1839, Rude’s marble bas-relief of Kindness for the tomb of his master Pierre Cartellier (Paris, Père Lachaise Cemetery) had shown nostalgia for the softness and delicacy of pre-Revolutionary sculpture. His artistic legacy to Dijon—two mythological pieces, Hebe and the Eagle of Jupiter (marble, 1846–57) and Cupid, Ruler of the World (marble, 1848–57; both Dijon, Musée B.-A.), neither of which was completed at the time of his death—exhibits this nostalgia to a degree that has embarrassed Rude’s apologists. It nevertheless accords with a wider accommodation of 18th-century style among Second Empire sculptors. The Cupid was commissioned by Anatole Devosge (1770–1850), son of his first teacher, and so probably represented for Rude a return to his point of departure in art. After his death, and particularly in his native Burgundy, Rude was exalted as a proletarian yet patriarchal figure, deeply rooted in local tradition. No such stereotype, however, emerges from the informative and scholarly biography by Louis de Fourcaud.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lami
M. Legrand: Rude: Sa vie, ses oeuvres, son enseignement (Paris, 1856)
L. de Fourcaud: François Rude, sculpteur: Ses oeuvres et son temps (Paris, 1904)
L. Delteil: Le Peintre-graveur illustré (Paris, 1906–26), vi; (R New York, 1969); appendix and glossary, xxxii (New York, 1970)
L. Benoist: La Sculpture romantique (Paris, 1928)
Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth-century Sculpture from North American Collections (exhibition cat., ed. P. Fusco and H. W. Janson; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Musée A., 1980)
Autour du Néoclassicisme en Belgique, 1770–1830 (exhibition cat., ed. D. Coekelberghs; Brussels, Musée Ixelles, 1985–6)
A. M. Wagner: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (New Haven, 1986)
La Sculpture française au XIXe siècle (exhibition cat., ed. A. Pingeot; Paris, Grand Pal., 1986)