AUGUSTE RODIN | La Génie du repos éternel, agrandissement ou grand modèle

Conceived circa 1889

Musée Rodin, Paris 
Bruton Gallery, New York (acquired from the above in November 1987)
Acquired from the above circa 1990

Camille Mauclair, Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, London, 1909, pp. 89-90
Frederick Lawton, François-Auguste Rodin, New York, 1908, illustration of another cast p. 156
Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, The Bronzes of Rodin, Catalogue of Works in the Musée Rodin, vol. II, Paris, 2007, no. S.794, illustrations of another cast p. 395

Varied brown patina. Some abrasion on the proper left shoulder. Some dirt and accretions throughout, particularly in crevices. The work is in very good condition.
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While most of his contemporaries had living "masters" to educate them and nurture their development, Rodin instead chose Michelangelo as his absent master. In 1876, Rodin made his first voyage to Florence to study the Italian's work directly. The immediate impression was unexpected, as Rodin himself recalled: “When I myself went to Italy, my brain full of Greek models that I had passionately studied at the Louvre, I was greatly disconcerted by the Michelangelos. They were always refuting all the truths I thought I’d permanently learned!" (quoted in Raphael Masson & Veronique Mattiussi, Rodin, Paris, 2004, p. 151). Michelangelo’s art inspired in Rodin a sense of freedom that contradicted the classical canons of the time. Rodin himself had no intuitive affinity with the academic school of art: he had been rejected from the École des Beaux-Arts three times prior to his trip to Italy. His first encounter with the physical models of Michelangelo was therefore formative, not only liberating him from the preconceptions of his studies but inspiring him with a new kind of visual vocabulary: “The emotional quality of the modeling, the tormented poses, and the throbbing power that stemmed directly from Michelangelo’s non finito technique reassured Rodin, even as they revealed new paths to explore" (ibid., p. 151). Though inspired by Michelangelo, over the course of his long career Rodin created his own distinctive visual idiom that was to transform modern sculpture whilst still at times referencing the old.

The present model is exemplary of Rodin’s imaginative versatility in its numerous references. La Génie du repos éternel, which appears to be at the point of losing its balance, is a direct reference to The Spirit of Eternal Repose located in the Louvre and Skopas’s figure of Pothos (see fig. 1). 



This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Critique de l'Oeuvre Sculpté d'Auguste Rodin being currently prepared by Galerie Brame & Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2018-5730B.