FRANCOIS

See also:

• FRANCOIS RUDE (1784–1855)

RUDE (1784–1855)  , French sculptor, was born at Dijon on the 4th of June 1784 . Till the age of sixteen he worked at his father's trade as a stovemaker, but in 1809 he went up to Paris from the Dijon school of art, and became a pupil of Castellier, obtaining the Grand Prix in 1812 . After the second restoration of the Bourbons he retired to Brussels, where he got some work under the architect Van der Straeten, who employed him to execute nine bas-reliefs in the palace of Tervueren . At Brussels Rude married Sophie Frelniet, the daughter of a Bonapartist compatriot to whom he had many obligations, but gladly availed himself of an opportunity to return to Paris, where in 1827 a statue of the Virgin for St Gervais and a " Mercury fastening his Sandals " (now in the Louvre) obtained much attention . His great success dates, however, from 1833, when he received the cross of the Legion of Honour for his statue of a " Neapolitan Fisher Boy playing with a Tortoise," which also procured for him the important commission for all the ornament and one group in the Arc de 1'Etoile . This group, the " Depart des volontaires de 1792," a work full of energy and fire, immortalizes the name of Rude . Amongst other productions we may mention the statue of the mathematician Gaspard Monge (1848), Jeanne d'Arc, in the gardens of the Luxembourg (1852), a Calvary in bronze for the high altar of St Vincent de Paul (1855), as well as " Hebe and the Eagle of Jupiter," " Love Triumphant " and " Christ on the Cross," all of which appeared at the Salon of 1857 after his death . He died suddenly on the 3rd of November 1855 . See also P . G . Hamerton, Modern Frenchmen, five biographies (1878) ; Carl Adolf Rosenberg, Francois Rude (1884) ; Louis Gonse, Les Chefs d'ceuvre des musees de France (Paris, 1900) ; L. de Fourcaud, Francois Rude, sculpteur (Paris, 1904) .