Rodin_2011

20. Head of Balzac (Tête de Balzac)

Conceived c. 1897 , cast between 1925 and 1935 (final state; version with neck cut off behind ear) Bronze with brown patina, green nuances Height 7 ¼ inches ( 18 . 4 cm) Signed behind hair left: A. Rodin Foundry mark left side: A RUDIER FOUNDEUR PARIS Stamped signature inside cast

provenance Musée Rodin, Paris; Private Collection, near Tours.

literature Athena Tacha Spear, Rodin, Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art , Cleveland, 19 6 7 , p. 91 ; Albert Elsen, Rodin’s Art, The Rodin Collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University , New York, 2003 , p. 375 ; Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, The Bronzes of Rodin , Paris, 2007 , p. 177 , vol. I, no. S. 7 6 5 ; (this example) Jérôme Le Blay, Catalogue critique de l’oeuvre sculpté d’Auguste Rodin , (in preparation), Paris, no. 2011 - 3355 B. Under the presidency of Emile Zola, the Société des Gens de Lettres (Society of Literary Men and Women) offered Rodin a commission in 1891 to produce a monument to the Society’s founder, the novelist Honoré de Balzac ( 1799 – 1850 ). The commission would pose some of the greatest artistic and practical challenges of Rodin’s career. The sculpture was to be a full-figure portrait measuring three meters high, and would be installed in the Place du Palais Royal—just across from the Louvre, facing the theater that now houses the Comédie Française—and was therefore meant to be viewed from a considerable distance. The commission also required that the work be approved and delivered to the Society within 18 months. Rodin was at the time working on a monument to the other literary giant of 19 th-century France, Victor Hugo ( 1802 – 1885 ). But whereas Rodin’s earlier work on a bust of Hugo had given the sculptor the opportunity to study and sketch Hugo from life, Balzac had been dead for forty years, and no death mask had been made to preserve his features. Rodin did have access to an overwhelming number and range of drawings, caricatures, and verbal descriptions of Balzac’s facial features at different stages of his life, and of his short, thick-set body with its famously huge paunch. The only photographic evidence was a daguerreotype by Louis- Auguste Bisson ( 1842 , Maison Balzac), which was reproduced as a more modern photograph by Nadar sometime around 1892 . There were also several bust-length sculptures, but only one statue showing the full figure of Balzac. Produced by Alessandro Puttinati in 1831 (marble, Maison de Balzac, Paris), it was only 32 ½ inches high, and depicted a young Balzac in his famous Dominican robe, rather than grapple with the writer’s actual physique. In addition to sorting through the staggering variety of Balzac’s iconography, Rodin set himself