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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Auguste Rodin catalogue critique de l'oeuvre sculpté currently being prepared by the Comité Auguste Rodin at Galerie Brame et Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2014-4341B.
This supremely affecting sculpture takes its title from the classical myth of the fifty daughters of Danaus, who murdered their husbands on their wedding night and were condemned to spend eternity drawing water in broken urns. Rodin's sculpture captures the anguish of one of the Danaïds as she realizes the futility of her task. Exhausted, she falls to the rocky ground, her back and shoulders hunched in despair, her head cradled against her arm, her outspread hair merging with water from her overturned vase. "A figure has thrown itself from a kneeling position down into a wealth of flowing hair," the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote. "It is wonderful to walk slowly about this sculpture, to follow the long line that curves around the richly unfolded roundness of the back to the face, which loses itself in the stone as though in a great weeping" (quoted in A.E. Elsen, op. cit., 2003, pp. 505-506).
Rodin conceived this figure in 1885, in the midst of his most intensive period of work on La porte de l'Enfer. Although the title Danaïde, grand modèle suggests that Rodin may have considered including the prostrate female figure among the churning, tormented bodies of La Porte, he likely did not intend the sculpture (or its close variant, Andromède) to illustrate a myth at the outset. Under the terms of the government's commission for La Porte, Rodin received ample funds to hire a large number of models, whom he encouraged to roam freely about his studio so that he could observe the infinite sculptural possibilities that their natural movements presented. Danaïde, Elsen has suggested, may have been inspired by the sight of a tired model who had slumped onto a piece of studio furniture to rest (ibid., p. 507). As Antoinette Le Normand-Romain has written, "The work owes the effect it produces to the model's pose, to the utter spontaneity of the twisting bodily movement captured by Rodin, and above all, to the exceptional sensitivity of the modeling" (op. cit., 2007, p. 294).
Rodin had the plaster model of Danaïde cast in bronze for the first time in early 1889, at the request of the art critic and politician Armand Dayot. "You have made a very good choice," Rodin wrote to Dayot after receiving the commission (quoted in A. Le Normand-Romain, op. cit., 2007, p. 293). Delighted with the sculpture, Dayot showed it to the Scandinavian collector Dr. H.F. Antell, who in turn requested that Rodin produce an enlargement of the figure in marble. Roughly fifty percent larger than the original plaster, this Danaïde was completed by June 1889, in time to be featured in Rodin's important joint exhibition with Monet at the Galerie Georges Petit. A second marble enlargement followed shortly thereafter and was shown at the 1890 Salon, where it attracted such acclaim that the French State decided to purchase it for the Musée du Luxembourg.
The present figure is one of several large bronze Danaïdes that the Rudier foundry cast from the first marble version of the sculpture. Rodin also made several plasters from this same marble, which he gave as gifts to close friends such as Camille Mauclair and Félix Bracquemond. "It's pure Correggio," Bracquemond exclaimed upon receiving the sculpture. "The modeling is everything" (quoted in ibid., p. 294).
This supremely affecting sculpture takes its title from the classical myth of the fifty daughters of Danaus, who murdered their husbands on their wedding night and were condemned to spend eternity drawing water in broken urns. Rodin's sculpture captures the anguish of one of the Danaïds as she realizes the futility of her task. Exhausted, she falls to the rocky ground, her back and shoulders hunched in despair, her head cradled against her arm, her outspread hair merging with water from her overturned vase. "A figure has thrown itself from a kneeling position down into a wealth of flowing hair," the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote. "It is wonderful to walk slowly about this sculpture, to follow the long line that curves around the richly unfolded roundness of the back to the face, which loses itself in the stone as though in a great weeping" (quoted in A.E. Elsen, op. cit., 2003, pp. 505-506).
Rodin conceived this figure in 1885, in the midst of his most intensive period of work on La porte de l'Enfer. Although the title Danaïde, grand modèle suggests that Rodin may have considered including the prostrate female figure among the churning, tormented bodies of La Porte, he likely did not intend the sculpture (or its close variant, Andromède) to illustrate a myth at the outset. Under the terms of the government's commission for La Porte, Rodin received ample funds to hire a large number of models, whom he encouraged to roam freely about his studio so that he could observe the infinite sculptural possibilities that their natural movements presented. Danaïde, Elsen has suggested, may have been inspired by the sight of a tired model who had slumped onto a piece of studio furniture to rest (ibid., p. 507). As Antoinette Le Normand-Romain has written, "The work owes the effect it produces to the model's pose, to the utter spontaneity of the twisting bodily movement captured by Rodin, and above all, to the exceptional sensitivity of the modeling" (op. cit., 2007, p. 294).
Rodin had the plaster model of Danaïde cast in bronze for the first time in early 1889, at the request of the art critic and politician Armand Dayot. "You have made a very good choice," Rodin wrote to Dayot after receiving the commission (quoted in A. Le Normand-Romain, op. cit., 2007, p. 293). Delighted with the sculpture, Dayot showed it to the Scandinavian collector Dr. H.F. Antell, who in turn requested that Rodin produce an enlargement of the figure in marble. Roughly fifty percent larger than the original plaster, this Danaïde was completed by June 1889, in time to be featured in Rodin's important joint exhibition with Monet at the Galerie Georges Petit. A second marble enlargement followed shortly thereafter and was shown at the 1890 Salon, where it attracted such acclaim that the French State decided to purchase it for the Musée du Luxembourg.
The present figure is one of several large bronze Danaïdes that the Rudier foundry cast from the first marble version of the sculpture. Rodin also made several plasters from this same marble, which he gave as gifts to close friends such as Camille Mauclair and Félix Bracquemond. "It's pure Correggio," Bracquemond exclaimed upon receiving the sculpture. "The modeling is everything" (quoted in ibid., p. 294).