Marble lady

Glancing through an old number of the RA arts magazine, picked up at RPPL, I came across a piece about Rodin (reference 1). In which I was very struck by the small image reproduced above. I thought it work in progress, while wondering why the marble it was being cut from was so much larger.

I also thought it a single figure. Maybe a whiff of misogyny about it? But it did not occur to me that the central lady was part of a group.

Then upstairs in my study, without bothering to go downstairs to fetch the magazine, I thought to ask Bing what it was. He was not very helpful.

Google did rather better, so much so that I overlooked the qualifying ‘likely’. However, search for ‘puisqu'elle est de la nature’ produced nothing useful – except reference 2, from which I learned that Rodin never carved marble himself. He made a model and then got carvers into his studio to turn a block of marble into the work in question. Which I find odd: you would think a tactile chap like Robin would want to feel the working of the marble under his own hands.

But then, Millais was content to give his drawings to the Dalziels for the purposes of printing magazines and printing books, for which see reference 3.

I noted without following up that Gemini says ‘rarely carved’ while the Clerk Art Institute says ‘never carved’.

Drew a blank at the Musée Rodin in Paris. A place which we failed to visit properly back in 2007, as noticed at reference 5.

I was then reduced to going downstairs to take a picture of the picture, the one at the top of this post.

Now Google Images gets it straight away, as confirmed by reading the caption in the magazine – the Earth and the Moon – La Terre et la Lune – over on the facing page to be fair. With what looks like the very image used by the Gayford bottom left, from Tokyo. For which see reference 6 and 7. But for the thing itself, one is told to go to reference 8, which tells me that:

This group derives ultimately from Rodin's 'Gates of Hell'. Together with an earlier marble version, ordered in 1898 and delivered in 1900, it derives from an original plaster in the Musée Rodin in Paris. The small scale of the figures relative to the roughly worked block suggests the emancipation of the spirit from brute matter. The title implies a contrast between the mundane and the ethereal. This work was purchased by Gwendoline Davies in 1914.

And the Musée Rodin has another, to be found at reference 9.

Which gives us the snap above. It looks more to me than three states of one work, so maybe three versions of the same work, with the two on the left being the same.

Perhaps Rodin sold so well, that multiple copies of the essentially same work was good business – particularly if he was not doing too much of the work himself. I associate to the Brueghels, who went in for mass production too.

On which the best I can do upstairs is reference 10, but Bing offers the book above, of references 11 and 12.

The caption in the magazine talks about the photographer being Jacques-Ernest Bulloz. I have been unable to run down a good quality copy of the original, but Google offers the snap above. A contemporary and close collaborator.

Conclusions

Once again, one needs to have a care with search, even when assisted by AI.

It also helps to bother to read the caption. Or, as an honorary aunt once told me, when all else fails, read the instructions.

PS 1: the source of ‘puisqu'elle est de la nature’ up at the beginning will have to remain a mystery for now.

PS 2: this Brueghel talk reminded me that back in 2023, I had trouble with a memory of a witch painting, as noticed at reference 14. I try Gemini on the problem today and the best we can do is Brueghel’s ‘Dulle Griet’ which I had turned up at the time. But I was not satisfied…

However, in his response to my suggestion of Bosch today, he offered the following:

‘… Bruegel's innovation: It was actually Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his print publishers who heavily popularized the modern, broomstick-riding, conical-hat-wearing witch in the Low Countries…’.

Which is a useful value-add. A checkable value-add even.

References

Reference 1: Rodin – Martin Gayford – 2006. Royal Academy of Arts Magazine No. 92.

Reference 2: https://www.clarkart.edu/microsites/rodin/about-the-exhibition/process-sculpture. 

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/tate-britain.html. 

Reference 4: https://www.musee-rodin.fr/. 

Reference 5:  https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/10/p15e-continued.html. 

Reference 6: https://www.book-komiyama.co.jp/. Some kind of art operation in Tokyo.

Reference 7: Rodin - Catherine Lampert, Royal Academy of Arts – 2006.

Reference 8: https://museum.wales/collections/online/object/d5eab174-0394-33d2-9c69-a7bf83b6f17c/The-Earth-and-Moon/. 

Reference 9: https://www.musee-rodin.fr/musee/expositions/rodin-chair-marbre. 

Reference 10: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2009/04/back-to-school.html. 

Reference 11: Brueghel Enterprises – Peter van der Brink (editor), Ted Alkins (translator), Ludion – 2001.

Reference 12: https://ludion.be/en/home. Art book people.

Reference 13: https://www.burlington.org.uk/archive/article/revealing-rodin. A stray piece about Rodin, turned up in the margins: '... remind us that Rodin’s creation was mediated through the hands of his assistants. As attractive and useful as the exercise might be, this runs the risk of suggesting a double authorship, which would have been anachronistic then and remains irrelevant today. Creation (conception) and production (making) were different matters, handled respectively by artist and technician...'. Hmmm.

Reference 14: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/common-sense.html.