Rude’s Awakening

The Sculptural Revolution of Francois Rude

A true story of the Romantic Revolution.

A sensitive and silent soul born into the turmoil of the French Revolution, François Rude defied his working-class origins to excel as a student of sculpture, winning top honors at the world’s most prestigious art school in Paris. Achieving his victory de-manded that Rude deny his natural impulses and subjugate his aesthetic to the cold official style of the Empire. Napoleon’s exile after the battle of Waterloo, however, cast Rude’s future into chaos.

At a moment of profound societal and artistic upheaval and disillusioned by the return of the Monarchy, Rude threw away his future as a Prix de Rome winner and followed his unrequited love, a talented painter and the daughter of a wanted Bonapartiste, into an exile of his own making.

With little to lose, he struggled in obscurity to reinvent his art from scratch, but that was only the beginning of the arduous path François Rude took to become the man and the artist he was meant to be - and in doing so, changed sculpture forever.

Rude's Awakening is an historically accurate portrayal of the world of figurative sculpture in the nineteenth century, told by a sculptor and art historian in a unique position to tell it. Jason Arkles' training descends directly from the methods François Rude inaugurated six generations before him. This connection to the past has been the lodestone for his passion as an art historian and storyteller.