general-and this was crucial-they lacked the assurance of their high­born predecessors. Timid in their tastes, they leaned to works that im­itated the past or reflected a touch of sentiment, and they favoured the artists who would oblige.

Rodin himself blamed the wealthy new middle class of France for much bad art. "Go visit the collectors," he said, "go into their rich bour­geois salons and look around you-you wilt see only things which are sad, dead, ugly, and without interest." In addition to the private col­lectors, there was the state, which in France had taken over royalty's role as chief patron. This shift was less than advantageous to artists, con­sidering the hordes of bureaucrats with which they now had to contend. The state's preference in art leaned not only to self-glorification as had been the case with the Bourbon kings-but to the celebration of civic virtue and sound moral precepts. In 19th Century France these of­ficial criteria were pursued with increasing ponderousness and decreas­ing grace. The state's grand-opera houses, facades, arches and memorials festooned with figures suffocated under their own decorations. A happy combination of sculpture and architecture was rare. Sheer ornament was the rage. As the leading American authority on Rodin, Albert El­sen, has written, when Rodin came on the scene sculpture had become "the stepchild of the arts ... relegated to decoration."

Moreover, the state's machinery for "administering" art inevitably in­hibited men of originality. Beside the Ministry of Fine Arts, which had to approve all designs for public buildings and statuary, stood the vet­eran Institute de France, in effect the official watchdog of French culture. Among its several branches was the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which in turn run the celebrated school known as the École des Beaux-Arts -the "Grande École," in the eyes of its students and aspirants. The school was almost the mandatory route to artistic recognition, especially ü one won the right to exhibit at the quasi-official annual Salons. Pre­siding over these "bazaars" (as the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Galled them) were judges who were themselves almost always school graduates and members of the Academy, and whose rejection of a prof­fered work could mean financial disaster to an artist. By Rodin's time the Academy-Salon complex had long frozen into a fixed position, and so had most of the sculpture the Academicians produced. By the mid­18btk Zola-a man no lens concerned with the state of the arts than Bau­delaire-was denouncing the Salon jurors as "timid mediocrities" with "stolen reputations," a "coterie of cooks" who served up only a non­descript "ragout."

Rodin himself, who as a young student could not win admission to the Grande École, was never vindictive to the point of assailing the idea of an official Academy. Indeed, as Albert Elsen has emphasized, Rodin shared many of the Academy's ideas; he staunchly believed in for­ma) discipline and in training young sculptors and painters to produce art that would ennoble and offer tribute to the nation's past. What af­fronted Rodin, however, was what he saw being produced at the school. It was so committed to convention, he once remarked, that it could never "look truth in the face."

Less than a century Barlier the liveliest sculptor in France had been Jean-Antoine Houdon, whose masterwork was a searching likeness of Voltaire in old age psychologica) tour de force that conveyed all of the man's wit and malice, a portrait so incisive that it stood unchallenged for generations. In later years Houdon went to America to execute two figures of George Washington one in his Continental Army uniform, handsome and stately, the other in imperial Roman toga. Lofty but blank. The latter effort expressed the growing vogue for Imitation of the antique that dominated sculpture until well into Ro­din's time.

This increasingly modish neoclassical style above all favoured nos­talgia for the distant past. It was a taste for the Neoclassical that caused the Italian Antonio Canova to sculpt Napoleon I, a short, stocky man, as a colossal nude Caesar. The Emperor's earthy sister, Pauline, was similarly cast as an Olympias Venus. The style was professorial, polite. One celebrated practitioner of the Neoclassical was the Danish sculptor fiertel Thorvaldsen. In 1816 Thorvaldsen worked and the restoration of a group of ancient marble statues discovered in the ruins an the Greek is­land of Regina, hut so doctored them that they emerged as Pallid, sexless shapes. Today this would be considered an act of vandalism; at the time, the new- look the statues acquired became the rage.

No Institution seized on the neoclassical formula more avidly than did the French Academy. With Bach decade fits teachings increasingly congealed. There was an acceptable "grande figure" style, a repertory of correct "classical" Gestures to convey such themes as Civic Virtue, Military Courage,