The19th Century

French Sculpture Self Guided Tour

Lion Crushing a Serpent Antoine Louis Barye

1832

SuzonAuguste Rodin

1875

Eternal SpringAuguste Rodin

1884

European Gallery European Gallery

The ThinkerAuguste Rodin

1880

Head of a Young Girl

Auguste Rodin

In 1880, Rodin was commissioned to sculpt two huge doors which became his greatest work, The Gates of Hell, which drew its inspiration from Dante's Inferno. The pinnacle figure is the eternal observer, the witness and judge of mankind in its struggle with its own misshapen desires. Poised at the very apex of the work, it is arguably the most famous sculpture in the world: The Thinker. Rodin originally intended this crown piece to be Dante himself, looking over all the sinners in hell. The moment Rodin chose to replace Dante with his image of The Thinker, The Gates of Hell became his personalized vision of humanity and fear. Rodin identified with The Thinker: the thinker is an artist, and the artist is thoughtful and can detach himself from the crowds and its passions in order to reveal humanity to itself. But, however Rodin may have seen him, criti-cal interpretations of The Thinker have changed over the years. Today, what was once seen as a figure despairing at man's powerlessness has now become a universal symbol of hope and belief in man's resourcefulness. To Rodin, hell was a condition of being without hope, but The Thinker was always intended to sit just beyond hell, regarding the fall that could be, yet retaining the possibility of redemption. The works that were permanent to the Gates of Hell were about the pain of desire. One of the most powerful of these was the Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone. The word "caryatid" origi-nally referred to "women of Karyae," who were enslaved by the Greeks after the Persian Wars. The stone is a symbol of a caryatid's mental suf-fering, of the burden life condemned her to carry. Note that the rock is left as raw marble in places. Conservative critics chronically complained that Rodin's works were left unfinished. However, Rodin is considered a bridge be-tween the romantics and the modernists. He was beginning to divorce sculpture from the need for meaning and in doing so, he prefigured modern sculpture by producing work that celebrated form while remaining free of narrative. In pieces like Head of a Young Girl, we can see the concern with the integrity of the medium that is a hallmark of modernism; the stone is deliberately left raw in places, the figure just emerging from the material in a way that juxtaposes the delicacy of the face with the reality of the stone.

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In the late 18th century in France, young sculptors re-ceived their training from the Royal Academy. After the Revolution, it became known as the Ecole des Beaux Arts which dominated their lives, controlling their education with a tightly prescribed curriculum and establishing hierarchies through which the artist slowly advanced within the system from academician to professor to of-ficer. Commissions were given based on the Academy prestige of the individual artist. This system trained scores of famous French artists while the Paris Salon showcased their works. Some of the finest artists not only trained in the Ecole, but also returned to instruct the next generation of artists.

Auguste Rodin (1840-1926) is arguably one of the greatest sculptors the world has ever known. He was rejected from the Grand Ecole three times for, ironically, fail-ing the sculpting exam. Though considered a titan among French artists and so central to Western art that only Michelangelo is better known as a sculptor, Rodin struggled to find success and was wholly unexhibited for the first 30 years of his life. His first commercially successful piece was the bust of a young woman entitled Suzon. At the time, he was working for the premier decorative sculptor Albert Ernest Carrier-Belleuse in his atelier or studio in Belgium. Unfortunately, Rodin sold the rights for unlimited editions of Suzon, which put his sculpture in every household, but very little money in his pocket. In 1880, Rodin won a commision from the mayor of Calais, who proposed a monu-ment depicting the historical sacrifice of six citizens during the Hundred Years War. Rodin's design was controversial. He did not present the burghers in a traditional manner with a single hero or a rhetorical gesture; rather all six men appeared sul-len and worn. Each face of the six figure momument suggests different stages of unresolved inner struggles, as can plainly be seen on the maquette of Jean D'Aire. Rodin intended this psychological study to remain on ground level where viewers may have walked amongst the Burghers. While Rodin had drawn and sculpted nudes before, they lacked sensuality, which would soon surface and become the central hallmark of his work. The nude figures shown in Eternal Spring were a more conservative, academic approach and provoked little critical excitement when first exhibited, at least partially because it was originally associated in the public mind with two safely distant and idealized mythological figures, rather than a real-life adulterous couple, unlike The Kiss, which caused tremendous controversy. Although based on a story from Dante's Inferno, The Kiss looks startlingly contemporary. These were not neo-classical gods or nymphs; these were a young man and young woman engaged in naughtiness.

Jean D'AireAuguste Rodin

1884

The KissAuguste Rodin

1898

Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone

Auguste Rodin 1891

American History Gallery Tapestry Gallery Bonheur Gallery

Rosa Bonheur (1822- 1899) was popular largely because she painted and sculpted in the style that became known as “juste milieu” – in other words, a middle ground that managed to combine the innovations of romanticism with the traditions of Neo-classicism. Though the child of an artist, Rosa, as a female, was not allowed to attend the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts. Instead, at the age of 14, she began training herself by copying works at the Louvre and had her first triumph at the Paris Salon, the annual juried artistic competition, when only 19 years old. Most of her early work was based on the small menagerie her father allowed her to keep in their sixth floor apartment; she helped her brothers Isidore and Auguste develop their own artistic gifts in return for their help in carrying her animal subjects up and down the stairs.

Jules Pierre Mene (1810-1879) was born in Paris, the son of a prosperous metal-turner. His father trained him in metal-working techniques and the boy quickly put them together with his own natural talent for drawing and began cre-ating small sculptures. The young Mene never attended any well-known schools and seems to have been largely self-taught as an artist. Always an astute business-man, in 1837 Mene established the first of what would be a series of foundries to cast his sculptures. The following year, he made his debut at the Paris Salon with a piece called Dog and Fox. From that point on, he regularly exhibited at the Salon, eventually winning four awards. He was extremely popular in England as well as France. In 1861, his reputation was secured by his induction into the Legion d’Honneur. Mene was also out-going and convivial and his home became a gathering place for painters, musicians, and fellow sculptors. Consequently, he was far more popular with potential purchasers than the perhaps more artistically gifted Barye.

Les Animaliers were a group of art-ists, primarily sculptors in bronze, whose works popularized images of animals outside of a narrative or historical con-text. The father of this movement was Antoine-Louis Barye (1796-1875), who is considered an artistic bridge between Neo-classicism and Romanticism, which favored the individual and emotional and moved away from narrative structure. Born the son of a jeweler and con-scripted into Napoleon’s last military venture at the age of 16, Barye managed to gain entry to the Ecole de Beaux Arts where he competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome and the chance to study in Italy. Though he continued to compete, he won little, and needing to support himself and his family, went to work for a jeweler in 1823 where he spent the next eight years making jewelry and small animal statues. He became obsessed with wild animals and began a self-study of various natural-ists' works. Though he continued to submit work, it wasn’t until 1831 that he had another work accepted at the Salon, and Tiger Devouring a Gavial was a sensation and won a Second Place Medal. He did well again in the Salon of 1833 with Lion Crushing a Serpent and received his first commission for a public statue. However, he was consistently attacked by conservative critics who felt that his “overly” naturalistic animals departed from the classical models. Even after he gained critical apprecia-tion, he failed to succeed in business. In 1839 he borrowed money and established his first workshop, issuing sales cata-logues and overseeing the casting of his models. Nonetheless, his perfectionism, which made for good art, made for bad business, and in 1848, he was forced to declare bankruptcy, losing all of his mod-els and tools to his creditors. Fortunately, he was later given the posi-tion of Professor of Zoological Drawing at the Museum of Natural History, and eventually appreciation of his work led to the award of the Legion of Honor.

Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) is widely considered the foremost French sculptor of the 18th century. He entered the Ecole Royale de Sculpture at the age of 12. After 8 years of study, he was awarded the Prix de Rome, France’s top prize, where the favored student is granted the opportunity to study art in Italy at the king’s expense. Houdon trained in Italy for ten years, and returned to France where he supported himself well on commissions. He took an active part in teaching at the Academy, and he was a chief contributor to every Salon. Houdon sculpted busts of most of the leading men of the day, and worked on commissions for royalty. After being cleared by the Convention during the Reign of Terror, Houdon journeyed to America to make busts of its most important leaders, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Jules Dalou (1838-1902) was considered Rodin’s rival for the title of the great-est French sculptor of the 19th century. Though born to a humble glovemaker, Dalou was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he quickly came to feel that the formalist limitations of the academic style upon which the school insisted stifled him artistically. Still, he persevered, gaining a reputation as ambi-tious and hard-working, if also visibly poorer than most of his classmates. Dalou was completely against the Ecole after failing to win the Prix de Rome, and when he was offered a professorship there, he turned it down. He frequently lamented, “Whenever I do anything in my statuary that is bad, I attribute it to what I learned [in the Ecole].”

Frederic Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904) was privately tutored in art in Paris and began exhibiting at the Salon at the age of 20, and did so for the next 50 years until his death. Glorifying the historic past with monuments was a principal subject of 19th century artists, as nostalgia for heroes of the past pacified political unrest in the present. Full scale editions of this work are exhibited in both New York and Paris. His most famous work rests in New York Harbor: The Statue of Liberty.

Gutenburg Page

Celestial Globe

The Prisons

16th C. Tapestry

Lion Crushing SerpentAntoine Louis Barye

1832

Jaguar Devouring HareAntoine Louis Barye

1848

Tiger Devouring a Gavial Antoine Louis Barye

1831

Huntsman with FoxPierre Jules Mene

1879

Dog Licking his Paw Pierre Jules Mene

Benjamin Franklin, J.A. Houdon

1778

George Washington J.A. Houdon

1778

Marquis de LafayetteJules Dalou

1881

Lafayette et Washington,

Frederic Bartholdi

Reclining BullRosa Bonheur

Lion Crushing Serpent,

detailAntoine Louis Barye

1832

EweRosa Bonheur