Rodin

Balzac, final study by AUGUSTE RODIN Plaster cast after a plaster proof of 1897, Château de Saché

Among world famous artists such as Turner, Ruskin and Whistler who visited Amboise to sketch the famous Château, was Whistler’s friend Rodin. Five of his Amboise sketches are in the Musée Rodin, Paris. *

They met in Paris as young art students. Rue de Varenne where Rodin had his studio was adjacent to the rue du Bac where Whistler lived and where Rodin enjoyed Whistler's Sunday afternoon gatherings. The friends stayed friends until Whistler’s death. Two letters survive from their last meeting in Whistler’s London studio. One is from Whistler to a friend expressing his hurt that Rodin had not expressed any wish to view his canvases. The other is from Rodin to a friend expressing his hurt that Whistler had not offered to show him his canvases. Decorum not working for either. 

Whistler greatly admired Rodin. The feeling was mutual. Many of Whistler’s critics dismissed him as a quarrelsome dandy but not Rodin who respected him and admired his work. Whistler, as President of the International Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers exhibited Rodin's works in the Society’s first exhibition. After Whistler's death, when Rodin succeeded him, he exhibited many works by Whistler at the first exhibition of his Presidency.

Rodin knew the Touraine very well. He described the Loire as ’that beautiful river which is not useful for navigation, only useful for poets’. Fascinated by its many famous châteaux, Rodin often toured the Loire valley. He paid his first visit to Tours in 1887 and returned often. He was in Amboise in 1888.

Balzac, torso in monk's robe, with smiling face by AUGUST RODIN Plaster original, 1893, Château de Saché

He and his mistress, the sculptor Camille Claudel, spent part of their passionate but ultimately tragic love affair in the nearby Château de l' Islette near Azay. Camille must have moved in first as she wrote to Rodin from there:

You cannot imagine how lovely it is at I’islette. Today I ate in the middle room, the one used as a conservatory, from which you can see the garden on both sides...it's so pretty there! I've gone for a walk in the grounds; everything has been harvested, the hay, the wheat, the oats; you can walk everywhere, it's delightful. She [the Chatelaine] told me that I should bathe in the river, where her daughter and the maid bathe without the least danger...it will spare me the trouble of going to the heated baths at Azay. Would you be good enough to buy me a little bathing costume—deep blue with white piping, in two pieces, blouse and pantaloons (medium size)…

While Camille sculpted La Petite Châtelaine, the granddaughter of the Châtelaine, Rodin worked on his famous/infamous sculpting of revered novelist, Honoré Balzac. Balzac was born in Tours and loved the Touraine.

Rodin agonised over his Balzac. Given an eighteen month deadline, in the end it took him seven years. He scrutinised the faces of local men searching for a Touraine type, for one that resembled Balzac as a ‘laughing peasant’ to personify the jovial Balzac described by his friends. In the end, he chose the driver of the public coach which ran between Azay and the station.

At nearby Saché, where Balzac wrote many of his novels, Rodin met Balzac's old tailor who still had the writer's measurements on file. It turned out that his chest and waist measurements were identical and that his trousers were ninety-two centimetres long. Balzac was short with a pot belly. 

Rodin paid the old tailor to make him a suit in Balzac's size but in the end, not wanting to depict Balzac in a suit, he showed him draped in the monk's robe Balzac used as a dressing gown when he was writing. He wanted to express Balzac’s soul, his humanity. 

One critic said scathingly that the novelist was represented as ‘a huge comic mask crowning a bathrobe’. Other critics asked why he had not shown Balzac when he was young, before he had a fat belly and before his neck disappeared under layers of fat.

Whistler, although ill, was alive when Rodin’s Balzac was rejected by the committee which commissioned it.

In 1905, Rodin was commissioned to sculpt a commemorative monument to Whistler. He decided to pay tribute to his old friend by carving a nude woman with no arms he called Muse Climbing the Mountain of Fame. Severely criticised, it remained unfinished when Rodin died in 1917.

In 1939 Rodin’s Balzac was cast in bronze and placed on the Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris. No-one understood great art better than eminent art historian Sir Kenneth Clark. He devoted his life to the study of art. Director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford when he was just twenty-seven, three years later he was appointed Director of The National Gallery in London. As Slade Professor of Fine Art, one of the most influential figures in the art world, Clark was chosen to catalogue the vast collection of Leonardo da Vinci drawings at Windsor Castle.

He said in Civilisation (TV series) Rodin's ‘statue of Balzac is the greatest piece of sculpture...since Michelangelo’.

• copyrighted by Musée Rodin, Paris

Post by Pamela, photography by Mark.