| Romantic Sculpture |
Romanticism, another major movement in 19th-century art, afforded sculptors the opportunity to free themselves from past models. New works were created based on the imagination and appealing to the emotions. In France, leading romantic sculptors were François Rude, Antoine Louis Barye, and Jean Baptiste Carpeaux. Rude is best known for his stirring monumental sculptures on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, especially the Departure of the Volunteers in 1792—also called La Marseillaise—executed in 1833-1836. A great winged figure personifying Liberty is shown above a group of men: She is rushing forward, screaming, urging them on to battle. Barye was perhaps the finest animal sculptor since antiquity. His meticulously rendered bronzes have an air of authenticity, suggesting wild animals observed in their native habitats but in actuality resulting from Barye's frequent visits to the Paris zoo. Carpeaux's famous group, La Danse (1867-1869), graces the facade of the Paris Opéra. The vivaciousness of the figures and the effect of rippling light and shadow created by the modeling of their surfaces have a strong affinity with rococo art. The towering figure of 19th-century sculpture—and the most important sculptor since Bernini—was the French artist Auguste Rodin. His particular genius was the ability to reveal the inner life of the human being through gestures and attitudes of the body. Although he was a thoroughly original sculptor, Rodin derived inspiration from many sources: the Gothic art of the north, Donatello, Michelangelo, and even the rococo. Rodin's affinity with facets of classical style was demonstrated early in the naturalistic, rough-surfaced Man with the Broken Nose (1864, Rodin Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art), inspired by Roman portrait busts, and later in his career in the smooth marble finish and idealized eroticism of The Kiss (1886, Musée Rodin, Paris). In 1880 Rodin was commissioned to do a set of doors for a new museum (which was never completed). The project, known as the Gates of Hell (1880-1917, Musée Rodin), with its numerous small plaster figures, was a source for many large-scale, independent works cast in bronze, such as The Thinker (1880), Adam (1880), and Eve (1881), all in the Musée Rodin. Rodin's pupil and assistant, Antoine Bourdelle, was also a superb sculptor of the human figure, conveying a feeling of power and massiveness in his expressionistic bronzes, as in the Great Warrior of Montauban (1888, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.). In the U.S., William Rimmer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Daniel Chester French shared a romantic approach in their allegorical sculptures. Rimmer's Dying Centaur (1871, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Saint-Gauden's Adams Memorial (1886-1891, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.), and French's The Angel of Death and the Sculptor (1891-1892, Forest Hills Cemetery, Roxbury, Massachusetts) are moving works, demonstrating the American romantic artists' technical excellence. |
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