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.
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