Auguste Rodin

Cécile Goldscheider, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre sculpté, vol. 1, Paris, 1989, no. 77, illustrated p. 94 (with the original patina)

Rodin executed Portrait of a Young Girl about 1875 when he was 35, a few years after accompanying his teacher Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824-1887) to Brussels.  While for most artists of his generation 35 represented a mature age, Rodin’s genius was comparatively slow to develop and his true personality only expressed itself subsequently.  During this period, artists such as the painter Renoir (1841-1919) and sculptors Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875) and Carrier-Belleuse looked back for inspiration to the art of eighteenth-century France, finding in it a life and expression they felt was absent from academic art.  Additionally, at the Petite École in Paris the teaching of Lecoq de Boisbaudran favored the naturalism and vivacity of eighteenth-century art over the static idealism of ancient sculpture.  Rodin followed Boisbaudran’s training, and it is within the context of the eighteenth-century revival that his Portrait of a Young Woman is situated.  The rapidity of the technique suggests qualities of photographic instantaneity, where the subject’s surprised movement is captured and suspended in time.  By contrast, the few allegorical figures he modeled in terra cotta during the same period, such as Bacchante (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, see Fig. 1), Dosia, Springtime (Musée Rodin, Paris), and Roses (Stanford, Stanford University Museum), obey the allegorical tradition and lack the singular expression and spirit that distinguish our bust.  In contrast to Rodin’s many imaginative busts from the same period, the sculpture is most likely a portrait, possibly of Mme. Rodin, although it has not been possible to identify the sitter.

Terracotta was a favorite material of eighteenth-century sculptors because it preserved the spontaneity and gesture of the artist better than any other medium.  In contrast to the intervention of tools, assistants, and long fabrication involved in producing bronze or marbles, terra cotta allowed immediacy of execution.  Modeled directly by the artist, the malleable material required no outside collaboration or assistance and provided the closest expression of thought process and gestures.  It is for this reason that sculptors usually chose terra cotta to fix their initial idea and conceive their sketches.  Rather than being a sketch, however, Portrait of a Young Girl is a unique work that Rodin never attempted to translate into marble or to reproduce in bronze.  Like his contemporaries, Rodin was fundamentally a modeler, an aspect highlighted in all of his sculptures.  In the present example the traces of his fingers working to form the hair or smooth the skin are evident.  The eyebrows, the fine hairs of the temples, the eyelids, and the hollows of the pupil preserve the mark of the sculptor’s chisel and the energetic precision of his gesture.

Fig 1. Auguste Rodin, Bacchante, terracotta, circa 1874, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Fig 2. Augustin Pajou, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, terracotta, 1783, Musée du Louvre, Paris