French art, classic and contemporary painting and sculpture by Brownell William Crary 1851-

Author:Brownell, William Crary, 1851- [from old catalog]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, French, Painting, French, Sculpture, French. [from old catalog]
Publisher: New York, C. Scribner's sons
Published: 1901-03-25T05:00:00+00:00

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CLASSIC SCULPTURE century honorable artists, sculptors of distinction beyond contest. But sculpture is such an abstract art itself that the sculpture which partook of the artificiality of the eighteenth century has less interest for us, less that is concrete and appealing than even the painting of the epoch. It derived its canons and its practice firom Puget—the French Bernini, who with less grace and less dilettante extravagance than his Italian exemplar had more force and solidity. With less devemess, less charm—for Bernini, spite of the disesteem in which his juxta^ position to Michael Angelo and his apparent unconsciousness of the attitude such juxtaposition should have imposed upon him, cause him to be held, has a great deal of charm and is extraordinarily clever—he is more sincere, more thoroughgoing, more respectable. Coysevox is chiefly Puget exaggerated, and his pupil, Coustou, who comes down to nearly the middle of the eighteenth century, contributed nothing to French sculptural tradition.

But Clodion is a distinct break. He is as different fit>m Coysevox and Coustou as Watteau is fix>m Lebrun. He is the essence of what we mean by Louis Quinze. His work is clever beyond characterization. It has in perfection what sculptors mean by color—that is to say a certain warmth of feeling, a certain inwudance^ a brave carelessness for sculpturesque traditions, a free play of fancy, both in the conception and execution of his subjects. Like the Louis Quinze painters, he has his thoughtless, irresponsible, involuntary side, and like them—like the best of them, that is to say, like Watteau—he is never quite as good as he could be. He seems

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FRENCH ART

not so much concerned at expressing his ideal as at pleasing, and pleasing people of too frivolous an appreciation to call forth what is best in him. He devoted himself ahnost altogether to terra-cotta, which is equivalent to saying that the exquisite and not the impressive was his aim. Thoroughly classic, so £Eur as the avoidance of everything naturalistic is concerned, he is yet as little severe and correct as the painters of his day. He spent nine years in Rome, but though enamoured in the most sympathetic d^ree of the antique, it was the statuettes and iBgurines, the gay and social, the el^ant and decorative side of antique sculpture that exclusively he delighted in. His work is Tanagra Gallicized. It is not the group of "The Deluge," or the "Entry of the French mto Munich," or "Hercules in Repose," for which he was esteemed by contemporaries or is prized by posterity. He is admirable where he is munitable—that is to say, in the delightful deco-ration of which he was so prodigal It is not in his compositions essaying what is usually meant by sculptural effect, but in his vases, clocks, pendants, volutes, little reliefe of nymphs riding dolphins over &ivoring breakers and amid hospitable foam, his toilettes of Venus, his fafade ornamentations, his applied sculpture, in a word, that his true talent Ues. After him it is natural

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