Francois Rude’s sculptural group, Départ des volontaires…
1836 CE
Francois Rude’s sculptural group, Départ des volontaires de 1792 (Departure of the Volunteers of 1792), a work full of energy and fire, immortalizes his name.
An intensely patriotic composition known as "La Marseillaise", it is a part of the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile, an enormous fifty meter high structure in western Paris, designed by Jean Chalgrin in 1806 to celebrate France’s military achievements.
Born in Dijon, had worked at his father's trade as a stovemaker until the age of sixteen, but had received training in drawing from François Devosges, where he had learned that a strong, simple contour was an invaluable ingredient in the plastic arts.
In 1809, he had gone to Paris from the Dijon school of art, and become a pupil of Pierre Cartellier, obtaining the Grand Prix de Rome in 1812.
After the second restoration of the Bourbons he had retired to Brussels, where, probably owing to the intervention of the exiled painter Jacques-Louis David, he had obtained some work under the architect Charles Vander Straeten, who employed him to execute nine bas-reliefs in the palace of Tervuren (now destroyed).
At Brussels, Rude had married Sophie Freiniet, the daughter of a Bonapartist compatriot to whom he had many obligations, but had gladly availed himself of an opportunity to return to Paris, where in 1827 his statue of the Virgin for St. Gervais and a Mercury fastening his Sandals (now in the Musée du Louvre) had obtained much attention.
His great success dates, however, from 1833, when he had received the cross of the Legion of Honor for his statue of a Neapolitan Fisher Boy playing with a Tortoise (now in the Louvre), which had also procured for him the important commission for all the sculptural frieze ornament and one group on the Arc de Triomphe, in Paris. (During the Restoration, construction had been halted and is not completed until the reign of King Louis-Philippe, in 1833–36, when the architects on site are Goust, then Huyot, under the direction of Héricart de Thury.)