AUGUSTE RODIN | L'Un des Bourgeois de Calais: Eustache de Saint-Pierre (Main Gauche), état définitif

Private Collection, France
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Mary Jo McNamara & Albert Elsen, Rodin's Burghers of Calais: Rodin's Sculptural Studies for the Monument to the Burghers of Calais from the Collection of the Cantor, Fitzgerald Group, London, 1977, no. 11, illustration of another cast p. 35
Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Rodin et le bronze, Catalogue des œuvres conservées au Musée Rodin, Paris, 2007, vol. I, illustration of another cast p. 231

Rich brown patina. Apart from some minor surface rubbing and dust in the crevices this work appears to be in overall very good condition.
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Auguste Rodin is hailed as the father of Modern sculpture and his works feature in the most important public and private institutions worldwide. The human body was Rodin’s preoccupation throughout his working life and he habitually observed real models to create anatomically accurate as well as emotionally intense sculptures. Like other sculptors, Rodin was trained to work in studies and partial figures, however unlike other sculptors Rodin in the mid-1880s came to recognise that ‘a part’ could be as expressive as a whole; in a pioneering move he began to exhibit these so-called ‘fragments’ as self-sufficient works of art. The most important among these are his models of hands. For Rodin, the hand was a crucial vehicle for expression – being the embodiment of ‘the gesture’. The artist’s direct and unrelenting scrutiny of hand gestures resulted in a series of models that are not only biologically incisive but also charged with astonishing expressive power. In 2014, The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University held a ground-breaking exhibition entitled Inside Rodin’s Hands: Art, Technology and Surgery. Building upon one professor’s practice of presenting Rodin’s hands to medical students and surgery trainees, the exhibition merged art and science, even enabling students to perform virtual surgery on the bronze hands in a feat of augmented reality. Dr Chang of Stanford University observed: ‘I have found that artists and surgeons appreciate human anatomy with equal passion.’

This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Critique de l'œuvre sculpté d'Auguste Rodin being prepared by Galerie Brame & Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2016-4835B.