rodin`s burghers of calais

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1 FIRST HALF square layout_Layout 1 01/10/2015 15:43 Page 2
RODIN’S BURGHERS OF CALAIS
UNDER THE SPOTLIGHT
is book was produced to coincide with
an exhibition at e Sladmore Gallery in autumn 2015
and to celebrate the gallery’s 50th anniversary.
The Sladmore Gallery
57 Jermyn Street, St James’s
London SW1Y 6LX
Telephone: + 44 (0)20 7629 1144
eh@sladmore.com
www.sladmore.com
Copyright © The Sladmore Gallery 2015
ISBN 978-1-901403-87-9
SLADMORE
INTRODUCTION
uguste Rodin is justifiably recognised today as not only one of the greatest
sculptors of all time, but also the father of modern sculpture. Having
grown up as I did in a house filled with animals and animal sculpture,
discovering Rodin in my late teens opened my eyes to a whole new world where
emotion was expressed through the human form.
As a sculpture dealer, I am also captivated by the complexity of Rodin’s casting
history, and I have spent many years refining my knowledge of the infinite
subtleties which surround his legacy. Consequently, mounting an exhibition such
as this one at the Sladmore has given me enormous pleasure, as it provides an
opportunity to view close up not just one, but two complete sets of Rodin’s
Burghers of Calais ‘under the spotlight’. Bringing these together with the gallery’s
current stock of individual Burghers and other related works has created a most
informative exhibition, and one that is unlikely ever to be repeated. is rare
opportunity to view several examples of the same sculpture together affords
rich comparisons.
e beauty in this series of scaled-down Burghers is their intimacy to the
A
5
viewer, something that obviously inspired Rodin to
create them from the life-size figures. Despite this
approachable scale, they lose none of the emotional
force found in the original monument, and for the
private collector or a museum visitor they provide all
of its drama, yet can be admired up close and from all
angles, just as the sculptor originally conceived them.
All the bronzes included in this exhibition are of
museum quality, whether lifetime casts or early
posthumous examples made under the authorisation
of the Musée Rodin, and all works are accompanied
by a certificate from the Comité Rodin in Paris. e
casting of Rodin’s sculpture is a complicated affair,
and it is important to seek advice from a specialist.
We are happy to advise clients on the purchase or sale
of works.
I would like to thank Patrick Elliott, Senior
Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern
Art in Edinburgh, and e Europe Trust, along with
others who have generously loaned works.
We look forward to welcoming you to the gallery.
Edward Horswell
Director
6
00
e Burghers of Calais
Maximum height 47 cm
is set cast between 1915
and 1950
00
9
Jean d’Aire
47 cm high
Cast 1915–17
Alexis Rudier Fondeur
00
00
Eustache de Saint-Pierre
47 cm high
Cast 1930–50
00
00
Pierre de Wiessant
45 cm high
Cast 1935–45
00
00
Jean de Fiennes
46 cm high
Cast 1920–25
00
Andrieu d’Andres
43 cm high
Cast 1945
00
00
THE MAKING OF A MONUMENT
1347
e Burghers of Calais has become Rodin’s most famous and recognisable
monument. It commemorates a historical event of 1347, during the early part of
the Hundred Years War between England and France. e French city of Calais
had been besieged by the English for over a year, and although King Philip VI
of France had ordered that it be held at all costs, its inhabitants were weak from
starvation. e English king, Edward III, offered to spare the lives of the other
citizens if six of the most prominent would surrender themselves. ey were to
come to him with bare heads and feet, each with a rope around his neck, and
bearing the keys to the city and its castle. Fully expecting to be executed, six of
the richest burghers gave themselves up to Edward in this way, but his queen,
Philippa of Hainault, intervened and their lives were spared.
beside the Houses of Parliament, London
1884
Over 500 years later, during a period of urban regeneration in France, the mayor
of Calais proposed that a monument be erected in honour of the burghers, and
21
Rodin’s name was put forward for the commission. In 1884, full of energy, and
in the first throes of his passionate relationship with the nineteen-year-old Camille
Claudel, Rodin started work on his proposal. Rather than following the brief and
producing a traditional statue depicting a single burgher – Eustache de SaintPierre, as the committee had suggested – he chose to represent all of them. His
first maquette was met with enthusiasm by the committee, and he received the
official commission. is sketch was cast into bronze only in 1970, by the Émile
Godard foundry for the Musée Rodin, when editions were made both with and
without the pedestal.
1885
Once commissioned, Rodin worked extremely quickly, modelling from scratch
in just eight months each of the six individual Burghers at a height of 27 in
(70 cm). He portrayed them as they leave their city, led by Eustache de SaintPierre; next to him, Jean d’Aire carries an oversized key. ey are in various states
of despair, each conveying to the viewer the deep emotion of the occasion. ese
six individual figures slotted together to form the ‘second maquette’, which Rodin
submitted to the committee in July 1885. ere were some reservations about
the strength of emotion that the figures displayed, but in the following year the
Calais banks went bankrupt and the committee was dispersed: as a result, Rodin
received no further financial support, but he now had complete artistic freedom.
is ‘first series’ that he had submitted was never cast into bronze by the sculptor,
and it was not until the early 1970s that the Musée Rodin began editing them
individually, in editions of twelve, plus one copy for the museum, all cast at the
Susse Foundry.
22
1885–9
e figures from this ‘first series’ were then scaled up to life size by Henri Lebossé,
Rodin’s principal enlarger, and over the next four years Rodin worked on these,
modelling them first nude and then with drapery. He completed a large number
of other related sculptures (as was his customary working practice) until he was
happy both with the final figures and with their grouping.
1895
Calais did not recover from its financial problems until 1895, when the finished
life-size group was finally unveiled. By 1996, all twelve examples of the monument
had been cast, four during the sculptor’s lifetime, one of which was acquired by
the National Art Collections Fund in 1912 and inaugurated near the Houses of
Parliament in London in 1915. e individual life-size figures were mainly cast
by the Musée Rodin from 1947, in limited editions of twelve and at a number of
different foundries.
1895–1903
Rodin then asked Henri Lebossé to work on the Burghers once again, this time
making 18 in (45 cm) reductions from the life-size figures. Rodin reworked
Lebossé’s reductions, completing the first, Jean d’Aire, in 1897, and the fih,
Eustache de Saint-Pierre, in 1903. e sculptor chose not to reduce the sixth
figure, Jacques de Wiessant. He valued the reductions highly, and included four
in the retrospective exhibition that he organised at the Place d’Alma, Paris,
in 1900. All five of these small versions were offered for sale by Rodin and
immediately proved popular – fourteen were cast by the Perzinka foundry
23
between September 1899 and February 1901, when only three or four of the
figures were ready for execution in bronze. François Rudier cast a further ten
between September 1901 and October 1904, and Alexis Rudier made 33 casts
between April 1902 and 1917. Other casts were made aer Rodin’s death by the
Alexis Rudier foundry, and later by the Georges Rudier foundry. Today, Jérôme
Le Blay of the Comité Rodin in Paris estimates that a total of between 25 and 50
examples of each of these small Burghers were cast, depending on the demand for
each model. By adjusting for the examples known to be in public collections, and
counting those that we have recorded on the art market over the last 30 years, it
is possible for us to gauge just how few are still in circulation today.
In all, there are close to 50 separate sculptures completed by Rodin that relate
to the Burghers of Calais monument, ranging in size from a small head study of
Jean d’Aire at 3 in (7 cm) right up to the life-size figures themselves. Overall, few
of the intermediate studies were cast in bronze by Rodin during his lifetime, with
the bulk of the works being edited posthumously by the Musée Rodin from 1945.
EH
First maquette, 1884. 33 cm high
Émile Godard Fondeur
24
25
2 SECOND HALF square layout_Layout 1 30/09/2015 10:30 Page 2
Maximum height 47 cm
is set cast between 1899
and 1917
00
27
00
00
Jean d’Aire
47 cm high
Cast 1901–3
François Rudier Fondeur
00
47 cm high
Cast 1910–15
00
00
Pierre de Wiessant
45 cm high
Cast 1914–17
00
00
Jean de Fiennes
47 cm high
Cast 1899–1900
L. Perzinka Fondeur
00
00
Andrieu d’Andres
43 cm high
Cast 1910–15
00
00
RODIN’S BURGHERS OF CALAIS:
A NEW IMAGE OF MAN
In his last will and testament, Charles Darwin, who died in 1882, insisted that
no public monument should be erected in his name. He wanted nothing to do
with ‘statuemania’ – the mania for making and erecting public statues to the great
and the good, which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century and had reached
new peaks by the 1880s. His wish was overruled: fieen years later, a statue was
erected in his home town, Shrewsbury. By the end of the nineteenth century, banal
and bombastic statues were appearing all over Europe, and particularly in France.
In Paris alone, it has been estimated that there were just eleven such statues in
1870, while the number had risen to more than 900 by the early years of the new
century.1 ey generally conformed to a formula. It involved a serious, frockcoated gentleman or bust at the top of a column or pyramidal structure,
and adoring allegorical figures gesturing with acrobatic grace below. A massive
plinth usually put the figures well above head height, thereby dramatising
the heroic element: you look up at them, and they look down at you. is
formula continued well into the twentieth century, in works such as Louis-Ernest
42
Barrias’s monument to the writer Victor Hugo of 1902. No wonder Darwin
wanted nothing to do with it.
So when in 1884 Auguste Rodin was asked to submit proposals for a
monument to Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the leading figure among the legendary
six burghers of Calais, the public would have had certain expectations. However,
he immediately made a bold new proposal: he would represent not one burgher,
but all six. How could you fit six figures on top of a column or pyramid? Clearly
you could not, so with this idea, Rodin changed everything. His first maquette
expressed this new idea: he would have all six figures standing on the same ground,
and give them equal weight. is first maquette had them all facing forward. is
was a nod to tradition: commemorative monuments normally have a clear front
and back and an ideal viewpoint. But this was Rodin’s first major free-standing
monument (he worked on the Gates of Hell simultaneously), and he soon had
second thoughts. He decided to rearrange the figures in a loose circle so that the
viewer would have to walk around the monument to see them all. Today, the
revolutionary thinking behind this change of tack is hard to grasp. But at the time
it was shocking, largely because it was ambiguous and confusing – precisely the
outcome that Rodin sought. One of the people responsible for the commission
objected to the idea, insisting that Eustache de Saint-Pierre alone, heroically
addressing the people, was the right subject to depict, and that showing the six
in sackcloth was ‘humiliating for the spirit of patriotism’.2 If designed in the
traditional pyramid form it would, it was argued, ‘stand out against the
horizon in graceful and elegant lines’.3 Rodin’s response was that he was ‘entirely
opposed’ to the conventional pyramid form, ‘which is in complete contradiction
to the early epochs of art; it makes works conceived in this spirit cold, lifeless
and conventional’.4
43
At one point Rodin had the figures standing on a conventional, tall base,
above head height, but again he had second thoughts. Instead he came up with
another extraordinary idea: to have the figures standing more or less at ground
level, so that the public could walk right up to them and inhabit the same physical
and psychological space. Whereas conventional monuments stressed the division
between hero and public, Rodin put them on the same footing. He wanted, as he
put it, ‘to let the public penetrate the heart of the subject’.5 e idea was so new
that the committee could not cope with it, and they put it on a tall plinth, despite
Rodin’s protestations. Only later, aer Rodin’s death, was the tall plinth removed
and replaced with a low one.
e committee went bankrupt in the summer of 1886, which proved to be a
blessing: they could no longer interfere with Rodin’s plans, and over the next few
years he made a variety of models – nude and clothed – which were scaled up to
the final desired size (about 200 cm) for the monument. He subsequently reduced
the finished, individual figures to a more manageable size, around 45 cm tall, to
make them available to collectors.
Just as the composition was entirely new, so too was the method of modelling.
Instead of finishing the surface in the conventional, detailed manner, and
representing every hair and fingernail, Rodin sought a more general impression.
e human body is basically quite a smooth form, but present it like that in a
sculpture and it looks lifeless. at’s because a real figure moves. It was by
exaggerating the bumps and hollows that Rodin made his figures look lifelike
and their feelings appear real. Also, his figures rarely perform any specific function
beyond standing, sitting or walking. One hardly notices that one of the Burghers
is carrying the key to the city gates. e key is a central part of the written story,
but Rodin’s goal goes beyond narrative: he wants to suggest emotional turmoil
44
Louis-Ernest Barrias, Monument to Victor Hugo, 1902.
Place Victor Hugo, Paris (until melted down in 1943 under
the Nazi occupation).
45
and ambiguous states of mind. Denied accessories, his figures seem to be caught
in some private reverie, addressing the individual rather than the crowd. It was
this ability to suggest mental states and deep emotional forces, simply through
the representation of the human body, that made Rodin’s work so remarkable.
It is simultaneously public and monumental, but also private in the response it
invites. e Burghers of Calais does not simply represent a new approach to art:
it represents a new approach to mankind.
e Burghers also offered a way forward in terms of Rodin’s technical
approach, which was idiosyncratic, but proved highly influential. is is
assemblage, a kind of three-dimensional collage. Rodin would make a limb
or head or hand, cast several copies in plaster, and then re-use them in different
contexts. He kept thousands of these plaster casts, arranged neatly in drawers,
ready to come into service at any time. Sometimes he used the same elements in
the same work. us in e Burghers of Calais, the hands of Pierre and Jacques
de Wiessant are identical (that same hand reappeared later, in enlarged form, as
an independent work, the famous Hand of God) while Jean d’Aire and Andrieu
d’Andres share the same head, but because they are tilted at different angles it
is hardly apparent. Rodin’s method underlies the approach of any number of
assemblage artists, who nailed bits of wood and garbage together, from Picasso’s
cubist constructions, to the Dada artists, to Paolozzi, Pop and Louise Nevelson –
the list is almost endless. ey might not have known it or acknowledged it,
or liked it, but their methodology can be traced back to Rodin and e Burghers
of Calais.
e Burghers of Calais monument quickly became recognised as one
of Rodin’s masterpieces. e full-scale work was first shown at the Monet-Rodin
exhibition at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1889, and the bronze unveiled in
46
Barbara Hepworth, Conversation with Magic Stones, 1973. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
47
Calais in 1895. Individual figures, variants and reductions were shown in plaster
and cast in bronze during Rodin’s lifetime. Around 1900, plaster casts of the whole
monument were shown in Paris, Venice (the city purchased it for the Ca’Pesaro
museum) and Vienna. A bronze cast was bought for Copenhagen in 1900,
another went to Belgium, and a cast was purchased and placed outside the Houses
of Parliament in London in 1915.
Towards the end of his life, Rodin was widely recognised as the greatest
sculptor since Michelangelo and Bernini. His status was such that a backlash was
inevitable. Aer the First World War, Cubist and abstract sculpture came into
vogue, and it was not until the 1960s that the truly revolutionary nature of Rodin’s
work began to be reappraised, by both sculptors and critics. By taking the figure
down from the base, Rodin removed the psychological barrier between the viewer
and the subject. is approach proved enormously influential and was reborn in
a wide variety of different forms. It is recreated, for example, in Giacometti’s ‘place’
sculptures, in which anonymous male figures stride around squares, leading up to
the Chase Manhattan Plaza project, with its larger-than-lifesize figures which were
intended to populate a real New York square in which people walked; and in
abstract sculpture, for example Barbara Hepworth’s Conversation with Magic
Stones – like the Burghers, a six-part composition, only in Hepworth’s work we
can walk between the figures. e same approach also appears in super-realist
sculpture of the late 1960s and 1970s, in the tableaux by Duane Hanson, George
Segal and Ed Kienholz, and later Juan Muñoz, in which multi-figure groups act
out theatrical scenes. Hanson’s Vietnam Scene (1969) and Race Riot (1969–71),
with their numerous figures and unfocused, untidy action, are, despite the
different subjects, reworkings of Rodin’s Burghers. It is striking actually, that it is
not until the late 1960s that anybody starts to make sculpture that looks a bit like
48
e Burghers of Calais. It took nearly a century to happen.
e six Burghers, some of them young, others old, are racked with torment
as they leave their city and their loved ones, facing, as they think, certain death.
However, instead of being tied to a particular episode that happened in 1347,
they represent all sacrifice, all suffering and, through that, the indomitable
triumph of the human spirit. It has been called ‘A monument to human crisis,’6
and really it could stand as a symbol of conflict – and ultimate triumph – in any
part of the globe. In fact it does. e work is equally meaningful and relevant in
London, Brussels, Tokyo, Paris and Washington DC – cities which are fortunate
enough to have bronze casts. e same is true of the single figures, and the smaller
versions. Rodin’s Burghers of Calais truly represents a seismic shi in sculpture.
Patrick Elliott
1
Gustave Pessard, Statuomanie Parisienne, étude critique sur l’abus des statues, Paris,
1912, p. 15.
2
Quoted in Frederic Grunfeld, Rodin: A Biography, Oxford, 1989, p. 248.
3
Ibid., p. 251.
4
Ibid., pp. 251–2.
5
Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, e Bronzes of Rodin: Catalogue of Works in
the Musée Rodin, Musée Rodin, 2007, Vol. 1, p. 214.
6
H. W. Janson, Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, London, 1985, p. 210.
49
Rodin’s signature from Jean
d’Aire. See pages 54–5
00
51
47 cm high. Cast 1906. Alexis Rudier Fondeur
00
53
Jean d’Aire
47 cm high. Cast 1910–17. Alexis Rudier Fondeur
54
00
EUSTACHE DE SAINT-PIERRE
Alexis Rudier Fondeur. Cast 1906
56
Alexis Rudier Fondeur. Cast 1910–15
57
JEAN D’AIRE
François Rudier Fondeur. Cast 1901–3
58
59
FURTHER READING
Auguste Rodin: Le Monument des Bourgeois de Calais 1884–1895 dans
les collections du musée Rodin et du musée des Beaux Arts de Calais,
Musée Rodin, 1977
e Burghers of Calais in London: the history of the purchase and siting of Rodin’s
monument 1911–56, by Susan Beattie, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1986
Rodin’s the Burghers of Calais, by Antoinette Le Normand-Romain and
A. Haudiquet, Musée Rodin, 2001
e Bronzes of Rodin: catalogue of works in the Musée Rodin, by
Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, 2007
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Jérôme Le Blay, Patrick Elliott, Oliver Wootton and
Robert Bowman for their help with the mounting of the exhibition; those private
collectors who have generously loaned works; Amanda Brookes and Paul Forty
for their work on the catalogue; and finally my colleagues here at the Sladmore –
Flo Horswell, Clinton Jones, Anna Taylor, Maria Karlsson and Sonia Harman-Dawson.
The Sladmore Gallery
57 Jermyn Street, St James’s
London SW1Y 6LX
Telephone: + 44 (0)20 7629 1144
eh@sladmore.com
www.sladmore.com
SLADMORE

rodin`s burghers of calais

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