Auguste Rodin

Musée Rodin, Paris

Acquired from the above on September 4, 1975

Georges Grappe, Catalogue du Musée Rodin, Paris, 1927, no. 189, illustration of the cast in the Musée Rodin

Albert E. Elsen, Rodin, New York, 1963,  illustration of another cast p. 95

Robert Descharnes and Jean-François Chabrun, Auguste Rodin, New York, 1967, illustration of the smaller version p. 169

Ionel Jianou and Cécile Goldscheider, Rodin, Paris, 1967, catalogued p. 105

Athena Tacha Spear, Rodin Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, 1967, illustration of another cast pl. 34

Albert E. Elsen, Rodin's Naked Balzac, The Burlington Magazine, London, November 1967, pp. 606-616, illustration of another cast pl. 6

John L. Tancock, The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin, Philadelphia, 1976, catalogued p. 458

Catherine Lampert, Rodin Sculptures and Drawings, London, 1986, no. 211, illustration of another cast

Rodin in his time: the Cantor Gifts to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (exhibition catalogue), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1994, no. 33, illustration of another cast p. 110

1898: le Balzac de Rodin (exhibition catalogue), Musée Paris, Rodin, 1998, no. 38, illustration of another cast pp. 288-289

When Rodin received the commission from the Société des Gens de Lettres in 1891 to execute a monument to Balzac, he offered to complete a bronze figure three meters in height within a period of eighteen months. What followed was a seven-year period of intensive contemplation of the life of this prolific writer, and one of the most memorable testaments to creative genius. Rodin’s depiction of Balzac signified a departure from the allegorical sculpture of the nineteenth century and marked a culmination of his long involvement with monumental public sculpture. According to Albert Elsen, “The artist himself regarded this as his most important and daring work, ‘the sum of my whole life, result of a whole lifetime of effort, the mainspring of my esthetic theory. From the day of its conception, I was a changed man’” (quoted in Albert E. Elsen, Rodin, New York, 1963, p. 89).

Although Rodin never personally met Honoré de Balzac, and was only a child at the time of the great writer’s death, he had considered the project for the monument for many years. Once officially assigned the task, the artist embarked on an extensive campaign of research, consulting texts by and about the author, as well as earlier portraits by other artists. As Athena Tacha Spear has written, “He read all of Balzac’s novels and biographies; he looked at many of the portraits made during the writer’s lifetime; he traveled often around Tours, Balzac’s homeland, to study the physiognomy of the people and the nature of that region; he even obtained the proportions of Balzac’s body from his tailor and thus was able to employ for the studies of the figure the appropriate models” (Athena Tacha Spear, Rodin Sculpture, Cleveland, Ohio, 1967, pp. 9-10). 

The present sculpture is one of the preliminary studies for the final monumental composition of Balzac. In all of them, Rodin’s concept was naturalistic in inspiration. In one version the figure is dressed in contemporary costume and leans against a pile of books. Rodin soon realized, however, that these attempts to recreate the outward appearance of the writer would never succeed in conveying his intensity and the magnitude of his literary contributions. The celebrated study of Balzac in the nude, probably executed in 1892, represented a shift in Rodin’s concept as he moved away from the relatively conventional early studies in the direction of a much more dynamic expression.