François Rude was one of the leading French sculptors of the Romantic movement and a close friend of the painter Jacques-Louis David. Although the two artists eventually had a falling out, David’s family asked Rude to make a portrait of David after his death in 1825. This terracotta maquette was made in 1826 in preparation for Rude’s formal portrait of David in marble, now in the collection of the Musée du Louvre. Although small in scale, the portrait combines the feeling of monumentality and grandeur typical of Neoclassical sculpture. Rude carefully represented one of David’s distinguishing features, his disfigured left cheek.