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.
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