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But the modern phases of French sculpture have a closer relationship with the Chartres Cathedral than modern French painting has with its earliest practice; and Claux Sluters, the Burgundian Fleming who modelled the wonderful Moses Well and the tombs of Jean Sans Peur and Phillippe le Hardi at Dijon, among his other anachronistic masterpieces, exerted considerably greater influence upon his successors than the Touraine school of painting and the Clouets did upon theirs.
These works are a curious compromise between the Gothic and the modern spirits. Sluters was plainly a modern temperament working with Gothic material and amid Gothic ideas. In itself his sculpture is hardly decorative, as we apply the epithet to modern work.
Every ecclesiastic on the Dijon tombs is a character study. Every figure on the Well has a psychologic as well as a sculptural interest. Poised between Gothic tradition and modern feeling, between a reverend and august æsthetic conventionality and the dawn of free activity, Sluters is one of the most interesting and stimulating figures in the whole history of sculpture.
At the same time it is equally evident that Rude's own temperament took its color from the transitional epoch in which he lived, and of which he was par excellence the sculptor. He was the true inheritor of his Burgundian traditions. His strongest side was that which allies him with his artistic ancestor, Claux Sluters.
It is really idle to wish that Rude had neglected the philosophy of his art, with which he was so much occupied, and had devoted himself exclusively to treating sculptural subjects in the manner of a nineteenth century successor of Sluters and Anthoniet. He might have been a greater sculptor than he was, but he is sufficiently great as he is.
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