Volume 29, Number 6 · April 15, 1982
Famous but Unknown
By Francis Haskell
French Sculptors of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Reign of Louis XIV
by François Souchal
Bruno Cassirer (Oxford, England), Faber and Faber, Volume II: G-L, 460 pp., $200
The sculpture commissioned by Louis XIV for the grounds of his palaces at Versailles and Marly constitutes perhaps the finest, the most imaginative, and the most attractive of the artistic achievements of that king's long reign. It is today certainly the most neglected. Although much has survived in one form or another, a great deal has been dispersed and reassembled in unsuitable sites, illustrations have (until the appearance of the present book) been largely unobtainable, and the little that has been written has rarely been stimulating or precise. Professor Souchal's remarkable catalogue, now in the course of publication, will help to resurrect artists whose names have been all but forgotten, will give substance to others who are (as Degas hoped to be) 'famous but unknown,' and will let us have some idea—but no more—of the magnitude and beauty of one of the most ambitious ventures of royal patronage ever conceived.
Review, 3187 words
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