JAMES PRADIER (1790-1832), though born in Geneva, was essentially a French sculptor, and excelled the artists of his day in his representations of feminine beauty. His masterpiece is a fountain at Nimes, in which the figures are fine and the drapery noble and distinct in treatment. The serious and comic Muses of the Fountain Moliere are excellent works. He made several separate statues which are well known; his Psyche has a butterfly poised on the upper part of the arm; Atalanta is fastening her sandals; Sappho is in despair. His Niobe group showed his power to represent bold action, and his Prometheus chained, erected in the garden of the Tuileries, is grand and spirited. We could name a great number of French sculptors belonging to this period whose works are seen in many public places which they adorn, but whose genius was not sufficient to place them in the first ranks of the world's artists, or make the accounts of them anything more than a list of works which has little meaning, except when one stands before them. Perhaps no one man had so wide an influence upon this art as had PIERRE JEAN DAVID (1793-1856), who is called David of Angers, which was his birthplace, in order to distinguish him from Jacques Louis David, the great painter, who was like a father to this sculptor, though in no way connected with him by ties of kindred, as far as we know. But when the sculptor went to Paris, a very poor boy, David the painter, whose attention was called to him in some way, was his friend, and gave him lessons in drawing and aided him in other ways. In 1811 David of Angers obtained the prize which enabled him to go to Rome, and after his return to Paris he was constantly employed. The amount of his work was enormous; many of his statues were colossal, and he executed a great number of busts and more than ninety medallions. He made the statue of Mme. de Stael; one of Talma for the Theatre Francais; the colossal statue of King Rene at Aix; monument to Fenelon at Cambray; the statue of the great Conde at Versailles; the Gutenberg memorial at Strasburg, which is one of his most successful works, and a large number of other sculptures. His chief characteristic is realism, and he carried this so far that it frequently became coarseness. David designed the relief for the pediment of the Pantheon. The inscription on the building declares that it is dedicated by a grateful country to its great men, and the sculptor seems to have had this in mind, for he represented in his group a figure of France surrounded by those who had been great in its times of war and days of peace. It is too realistic to be pleasing, and is far less creditable to the sculptor than are many of his less prominent works.