Rodin_2011

15. The Succubus (Succube)

Conceived c. 1887 – 88 , this cast by 1900 Height 9 1 ⁄ 4 inches ( 23 . 5 cm) Lost-wax cast bronze (used by Rodin only prior to 1900 ); Believed to be cast by François Rudier Signed

provenance Purchased from Robert Bowman, Ltd., 2003 ; Private Collection

literature Gustave Geffroy, Claude Monet. Auguste Rodin , excat, Paris, 1889 , p. 66; Serena Keshvajee, “ La Parisienne: un portrait de Claude-Emile Schuffenecker ,” in La Revue du Louvre , no. 2 , Paris, pp. 71 – 74 , 1997 ; Albert E. Elsen, Rodin’s Art: The Rodin Collection at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University , Stanford, 2003 , pp. 519 – 23 ; Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Rodin et le Bronze , Paris, 2007 , pp. 66 0 –6 1 . As has been thoroughly documented by Serena Keshavjee in 1997 , Rodin’s Succubus appears to be a most unusual example of Rodin’s directly ‘borrowing’ the imagery of a contemporary artist. The figure is taken from an 187 6 photogravure by Félicien Rops (whom Rodin met in 1881 ) titled Rare Fish. Rops’s image was not obscure. Edmond Bailly, printer and publisher Librairie de l’Art Indépendant, a publishing house and bookshop that promoted Symbolist literature, adopted Rops’s Rare Fish as its logo. According to Edmond de Goncourt’s journal, Rodin eventually had to acknowledge the source of the kneeling, animal-like creature with long hair. The entry is from May 15 , 1890 : “This evening at Madame Daudet’s, Rodenbach chatted away about how Rodin’s brain was haunted by Rops’s erotic compositions . . . how [Rodin], having made a statuette that was a copy of this sphinx, the crouching female who looks as if she’s howling at the moon, one of Rops’s most original creations, initially denied having had any memory of it, and then as various people recognized it, he one day confessed that it had imprinted itself in his mind, against his will, and that he had been unable to stop himself from reproducing it.” Whatever the source, the sculpture is a powerful instance of the impact of Symbolism on Rodin’s work As noted in the Musée Rodin’s collection catalogue of 2007 , Rodin was clearly drawn to the physical intensity of the image, while the work’s first purchaser, novelist playwright and journalist Félicien Champsaur, was probably more taken with the esoteric or arcane connotations of the sphinx-like figure when he bought a bronze in 1890 . An unfinished portrait drawing of Madame Champsaur by Emile Schuffenecker, also from 1890 , positions the subject in her drawing room just beside the sculpture.