Rodin_2011

and partly peculiar to Rodin’s own aims, evidently defeated the expectations of some of the sculptors’ contemporaries.

A study for the head and right arm in terracotta preserved at the Musée Rodin may be compared instructively with the Bust of the Age of Bronze . The study is just under a foot high, making its head considerably smaller than that of the present work, whose existence was revealed only in recent years to Rodin scholars. Previously unpublished correspondence, reproduced here, between Rodin, Rose Beuret, (Madame Rodin), Auguste Neyt, Madame Neyt and Bénédite document the present work while adding a final, moving chapter to Rodin’s many-storied relationship with Auguste Neyt. Most of the correspondence takes place around the New Year. In 190 6, Rodin re- established contact with Neyt; in 1908 , Rose thanked Neyt’s wife for an unnamed gift, perhaps sent to reciprocate Rodin’s present of the bronze that same year. Rodin and Rose visited Neyt and his wife in Ghent in 1912 , as documented by a letter from Rodin, thanking Neyt for the invitation. It is in a brief, undated New Year’s greeting from Bénédite to Neyt, which dates from between 1917 and 1924 , that we see a specific reference to the terracotta head: the writer assures Neyt that he hasn’t forgotten “ la petite tête de l’Age d’Airain. ” In a draft of a letter from Madame Neyt to Bénédite dated 1924 , just after the New Year, the writer gratefully acknowledges not just the gift itself but what it represents to her husband. One wonders if by this time, Auguste Neyt had any sense that he would become, as he surely is for us, one of the most famous nude models in the history of sculpture. In this letter, penned by his wife, he appears not as the model for The Age of Bronze , but as the master’s élève , Rodin’s humble student: “As a great friend of Monsieur Rodin and as propagator of his ideas and works, you preserve, around the great, absent master, the good memories that he always had of his student, my husband—who no longer leaves the room, in long contemplation of the little fragment of The Age of Bronze whose ensemble is of a charming harmony .”

1. Butler, 1993 , p. 99 2. Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius , New Haven, 1993 , p. 102