de Fourcaud, _exterioriser
nos idees et nos ames_. But throughout his life he halted a little
between two opinions--the current admiration of the classic, and his own
instinctive feeling for nature unsystematized and unsophisticated. His
"Jeanne d'Arc" is an instance. In spite of the violation of tradition,
which at the time it was thought to be, it seems to-day to our eyes to
err on the side of the conventional. It is surely intellectual, classic,
even factitious in conception as well as in execution. In some of its
accessories it is even modish. It illustrates not merely the abstract
turn of conceiving a subject which Rude always shared with the great
classicists of his art, but also the arbitrariness of treatment against
which he always protested. Without at all knowing it, he was in a very
intimate sense an eclectic in many of his works. He believed in forming
a complete mental conception of every composition before even posing a
model, as he used to tell his students, but in complicated compositions
this was impossible, and he had small talent for artificial composition.
Pages:
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186