Faith, Science, Order, Industry Protecting Labour. There was a prescribed rhetoric of belles pen sees-uplifting, positive thoughts. The figure itself had always to be bland, immobile, pure. ("But the Greeks," Rodin erupted at one point, „ where not like this”) To be sure, below the level of the appointed grands Sujets were the pe­tits Sujets that allowed some leeway. There was, inevitably, the Nude, and no opportunity was lost to display it to advantage. Much Salon art, whether sculpture or painting, seemed no more than an Invitation to view high-class, Guttural bottoms, such as those of the flying nymphs of Adolphe-William Bouguereau's Les Oréades or the swelling marble posterior of a kneeling maiden by Lorenzo Bartolini entitled, in heav­en's name, Trust in God. Rodin would never commit such an indecency.

But for many artists, genteel pensées were not enough. For these men was Romanticism, still an artistic force,in the mid-19th Century, with its multiple enthusiasms for liberty, for nature, for unleashed emo­tions, for storm and stress-the boundless, the spontaneous, the savage and exotic. In painting, Romanticism produced its master in Eugène De­lacroix, whose themes ranged from revolutionary politics to Arab horsemen in battle with animals. In sculpture, the movement did not fare so well, though Delacroix's heroic painting Liberty Legding the Peo­ple did find its counterpart in Francois Rude's fiert' relief La Marseillaise designed for the Arc de Triomphe. It is there today, theat­rical but epic and compelling, and one of the very few Romantic masterworks in stone. In large part, sculptors who turned from the bland and would-be classical produced simple anecdotage, preferably with a touch of violence.

Their members included a group that became known as animaliers, spe­cialists in producing renditions of large or smal beasts that could be shown in savage postures-as human beings, according to the Salon's canons, could not possibly be. The Salon gave Spate to Antoine-Louis Bart'e's Tiger Devouring a Crocodile and to Emmanuel Frémiet's pop­ular Gorilla Attacking a Maiden. Sculptural storytelling ran-also to the declamatory and the pathetic: there were innumerable Joan’s of Arc in all stages of victory and hazard, and the French defeat in the Franco ­Prussian War of 1870 led to a memorial by Antonin Mercié, set up in the frontier town of Belfort, in which "an Alsatian mother seizes the musket falling from the hands of her wounded son and stands an defence against the enemy."

Barye, for one, was a serious and purposeful man; Rodin attended his classes as a Young student and admired his studies from nature. But many other popular sculptors of the mid-19th Century wore a withering label, given them by the acidulous Baudelaire: they were pompiers, "fire­men" without convictions, whose sole aim was to quench the taste of tasteless people with money to burn. One of the most succesfull pom­piers of the time was Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, an engaging, facile, handsome man who ran a virtual factory of sculpture and decoration; with the aid of 20 or more assistants he turned out a huge Tine of stock studio busts, statuettes, figurines, candelabra and bric-a-brac in popular style. He was a considerable cut above the other pompiers, but he too might today be forgotten except that one of his assistants for many years was Auguste Rodin.

There were a few-a very few-superior men who dared strike out an paths of their own. Honoré Daumier, that sardonic critic of a human folly and injustice, turned from his prints and paintings to model a small gallery of ruthless images in clay: a blowsy orator, a toothless old wreck of a man, a quixotic, grotesque veteran, Ratapoil. This was re­alism coming forward-with a quality of caricature and social protest. A sculptor whom the young Rodin knew and admired was the inventive Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, whose dashing style was quite different from Daumier's; he was the favourite sculptor of Napoleon III and his gran­diose Court, yet a designer of great verve and freshness-as expressed, for instance, in his lively bacchanal, La Danse, designed for the front of the Paris Opera.

Still, when an artist of Rodin's cast of mind looked about and con­sidered who had gone long before-a Bernini, a Michelangelo, a Donatello, the sculptors of Greece and the nameless stone carvers of Gothic cathedrals-the sculptural heritage of France seemed sadly de­pleted. As he saw his opportunity, therefore, it was not to break sharply which tradition-so little of it survived in genuine form in any case - bui to Beek to revive sculpture and return to its best. In this sense he was one of the most conservative of radicals. As one of his nu­merous secretaries, Anthony Ludovici, recalled of some observations Rodin once made: "He never claimed that he had introduced anything fresh, hut that he had rediscovered what had been long lost by the ac­ademicians. The Greeks had possessed it, and so also had the Gothics. Bui in the official art of the day it was entirely lacking. His contribution ... was therefore an act of restoration."