nothing to French sculptural
tradition.

But Clodion is a distinct break. He is as different from Coysevox and
Coustou as Watteau is from Lebrun. He is the essence of what we mean by
Louis Quinze. His work is clever beyond characterization. It has in
perfection what sculptors mean by color--that is to say a certain warmth
of feeling, a certain _insouciance_, a brave carelessness for
sculpturesque traditions, a free play of fancy, both in the conception
and execution of his subjects. Like the Louis Quinze painters, he has
his thoughtless, irresponsible, involuntary side, and like them--like
the best of them, that is to say, like Watteau--he is never quite as
good as he could be. He seems not so much concerned at expressing his
ideal as at pleasing, and pleasing people of too frivolous an
appreciation to call forth what is best in him. He devoted himself
almost altogether to terra-cotta, which is equivalent to saying that the
exquisite and not the impressive was his aim. Thoroughly classic, so far
as the avoidance of everything naturalistic is concerned, he is yet as
little severe and correct as the painters of his day. He spent nine
years in Rome, but though enamoured in the most sympathetic degree of
the antique, it was the statuettes and figurines, the gay and social,
the elegant and decorative side of antique sculpture that exclusively he
delighted in. His work is Tanagra Gallicized. It is not the group of
"The Deluge," or the "Entry of the French into Munich," or "Hercules in
Repose," for which he was esteemed by contemporaries or is prized by
posterity. He is admirable where he is inimitable--that is to say, in
the delightful decoration of which he was so prodigal. It is not in his
compositions essaying what is usually meant by sculptural effect, but in
his vases, clocks, pendants, volutes, little reliefs of nymphs riding
dolphins over favoring breakers and amid hospitable foam, his toilettes
of Venus, his facade ornamentations, his applied sculpture, in a word,
that his true talent lies. After him it is natural that we should have a
reversion to quasi-severity and imitation of the antique--just as David
succeeded to the Louis Quinze pictorial riot--and that the French
contemporaries of Canova and Thorwaldsen, those literal, though
enthusiastic illustrators of Winckelmann's theories, should be Pradier
and Etex and the so-called Greek school. Pradier's Greek inspiration has
something Swiss about it, one may say--he