Drawings

 Portrait of Henri Becque

 1883-87, Drypoint on cream laid paper, 14.9 x 19.5 cm

            Rodin was introduced to copperplate engraving, or, to be more precise, to etching and dry-point engraving, in 1881, by his friend Alphonse Legros, then living in London. Although he soon mastered the technique, he only explored 13 subjects in his engravings, but often printed a large number of successive states. During his lifetime, the engravings he made after his portrait busts enabled him to familiarize the public with his freestanding sculpture and earned him an excellent reputation as an engraver.

            In the portrait of Henry Becque, Rodin placed a front view and two profile views of the writer side by side in the same copperplate, thereby multiplying the angles from which the sitter was seen and making him revolve around the sheet, like a bust placed on a sculptor’s turntable.

  Portrait of Antonin Proust

  1884-88, Drypoint on cream wove paper, 11.3 x 6.6 cm

 Springtime

  c. 1878, Drypoint on ivory laid paper, 14.8 x 10.1

Love Turning the World

1881, Drypoint on ivory laid paper, 20 x 25 cm

            Sunrise

  n.d., Watercolor, over graphite, on cream wove paper (discolored to tan), 31.6 x 47.8 cm

The Round

   1883-84, Drypoint in dark brown ink on cream laid paper, 8.5 x 14.9 cm

 Portrait of Victor Hugo, Three-quarter View

  1884, Drypoint on cream laid paper, 19.1 x 13.9 cm

 The author of Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Miserables was an old man when Rodin proposed to make his portrait. Hugo's patience with sittings had been strained to the breaking point by another sculptor whose efforts are reported to have produced a mediocre bust. Moreover, Hugo's devoted mistress Juliette Drouet was dying of cancer. Details of the story vary, but the earliest published accounts agree that Rodin was permitted to be present in the Hugo household and to make sketches, but that the poet would not actually pose. Rodin made dozens of drawings from every possible viewpoint, some rapidly sketched on the spot and others from memory, before being allowed to set up a modeling stand in an out-of-the-way corner to work in clay. From these preliminaries Rodin created the bust of Hugo that he first exhibited at the Salon of the Societe des Artistes Francais in 1884. A series of splendidly executed prints followed. The fifth state of this Three-Quarter View was published in the journal L'Artiste in February 1885.

Springtime

   c. 1878, Charcoal of black chalk, on blue laid paper with pink and blue fibers, 46.9 x 31.7 cm             

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Narim Bender
Bildmaterialien: Narim Bender
Lektorat: Blago Kirov
Übersetzung: Vasil Iotov
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 07.12.2013
ISBN: 978-3-7309-6772-0

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