RUDE, FRANOIS

born Jan. 4, 1784, Dijon, Fr. died Nov. 3, 1855, Paris La Marseillaise (Departure of the Volunteers of 1792), stone sculpture French sculptor, best known for his public monuments such as the Departure of the Volunteers of 1792, popularly called La Marseillaise (183336; Arc de Triomphe, Paris). He rejected the formalism of late 18th- and early 19th-century French sculpture in favour of a dynamic, emotional style and for more than 50 years became the paragon for artists working on official commissions. After the death of his father, whom he had assisted in his metalworking shop, Rude went to Paris determined to perfect himself in the art of sculpture. He won the Prix de Rome in 1812 but could not go to Rome because of the Napoleonic Wars. He was an enthusiastic Bonapartist. The attention of the public was first attracted to Rude by Mercury Attaching his Winged Sandals (1828; Louvre, Paris), a work that strictly conformed to the rules of the Neoclassical school of French sculpture. But Rude was obviously uncomfortable within the restrictions of the classical canon and might be called rather a Romantic-Realist. In his Neapolitan Fisherboy Playing with a Tortoise (1834; Louvre), the unusual pose and the open mouth both break with tradition. In the statue of Marshal Ney in the Place de l'Observatoire in Paris, the hand with the sword raised above the head and the open mouth again violated Neoclassic principles. The group of volunteers (for the Revolutionary campaign of 1792) on the Arc de Triomphe, although classical in detail, is romantic and impetuous in feeling. Many critics have felt that Rude's adulation of Napoleon Bonaparte was more powerful than his aesthetic judgment, causing his memorial, Bonaparte Awakening to Immortality (1847) at Fixin near Dijon (plaster cast in the Louvre) to be a grandiloquent failure, though others have admired its careful realism. Toward the end of his life, Rude returned to his early, classical style but achieved little of note under this reimposed discipline.