The Killing

Although Romanticism made its appearance in painting from 1820 onwards, there was a gap of ten years before it was expressed in sculpture at the Salon of 1831 by Duseigneur's Orlando Furioso, with its bulging muscles and twisted limbs, and the Tiger and Crocodile by Barye. These works were soon followed by Etex's Cain, executed in Rome, as a bravado gesture because he did not win the Grand Prix, and by the creations of Préault. Pride of place in the latter should be given to The Killing, an unrealistic juxtaposition of screaming masks with gaping mouths, streaming or bristling hair and clenched hands, all depicted with unrivalled violence. Conceived as an "episodical fragment," it reminds us today of the technique of "assemblages."

Préault was the pupil of David d'Angers. A typically Romantic character, he mixed 19th-century social ideas with his art. In 1834 he manifested his talent with a relief fragment (cast in bronze in 1859) called The Killing, a striking representation of figures larger than life, tearing at each other. This daring and nightmarish vision, possibly inspired by a popular melodrama of the time, is the work most characteristic of Préault's extremism, of his passionate concern with movement, ugliness and the colossal.