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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 2020-6220B.
“I do not know, in any art, of an evocation of souls so splendidly compelling,” the critic Octave Mirbeau declared when Rodin first exhibited Les bourgeois de Calais, his earliest commission for a free-standing, public monument and one of the defining projects of his career (quoted in J.L. Tancock, op. cit., 1976, p. 388). The group commemorates the heroism of six citizens of Calais who in 1347, during the Hundred Years’ War, volunteered to surrender themselves to King Edward III of England in exchange for the liberation of their city, which had been besieged for nearly a year. In a radical departure from traditional heroic monuments, Rodin eschewed all allegorical trappings, instead depicting the moment that the burghers, clad in sackcloth and nooses as Edward demanded, began their painful march toward death, their emotions conflicted and their suffering agonizingly real.
“I did not group them together in a triumphant apotheosis, for such a glorification of their heroism would not in any way have corresponded to reality,” Rodin explained. “On the contrary, I strung them out one behind the other, because, with the uncertain outcome of the final inner struggle being waged between their devotion to their city and their fear of dying, it is as if each of them has to face their conscience alone. They are still wondering if they will have the strength to make the supreme sacrifice. Their hearts urge them forward and their feet refuse to walk. They drag themselves along with difficulty, due as much to the weakness to which famine has reduced them as to their dread of their execution. And indeed, if I have succeeded in showing how the body, even when exhausted by the cruelest suffering, still clings to life, how it still holds sway over the soul enamored of bravery, I can only congratulate myself for being equal to the noble theme that I had to treat” (quoted in A. Le Normand-Romain, op. cit., 2007, p. 213).
“I do not know, in any art, of an evocation of souls so splendidly compelling,” the critic Octave Mirbeau declared when Rodin first exhibited Les bourgeois de Calais, his earliest commission for a free-standing, public monument and one of the defining projects of his career (quoted in J.L. Tancock, op. cit., 1976, p. 388). The group commemorates the heroism of six citizens of Calais who in 1347, during the Hundred Years’ War, volunteered to surrender themselves to King Edward III of England in exchange for the liberation of their city, which had been besieged for nearly a year. In a radical departure from traditional heroic monuments, Rodin eschewed all allegorical trappings, instead depicting the moment that the burghers, clad in sackcloth and nooses as Edward demanded, began their painful march toward death, their emotions conflicted and their suffering agonizingly real.
“I did not group them together in a triumphant apotheosis, for such a glorification of their heroism would not in any way have corresponded to reality,” Rodin explained. “On the contrary, I strung them out one behind the other, because, with the uncertain outcome of the final inner struggle being waged between their devotion to their city and their fear of dying, it is as if each of them has to face their conscience alone. They are still wondering if they will have the strength to make the supreme sacrifice. Their hearts urge them forward and their feet refuse to walk. They drag themselves along with difficulty, due as much to the weakness to which famine has reduced them as to their dread of their execution. And indeed, if I have succeeded in showing how the body, even when exhausted by the cruelest suffering, still clings to life, how it still holds sway over the soul enamored of bravery, I can only congratulate myself for being equal to the noble theme that I had to treat” (quoted in A. Le Normand-Romain, op. cit., 2007, p. 213).