Waldemar George, Aristide Maillol et l'âme de la sculpture, Neuchâtel, 1977, no. 190, illustration in color of another cast p. 90

Dark green patina. There is a minor scuff to the right breast, another to navel, a vertical scratch on her left buttock and some rubbing to the right underside of the arms. There is some minor surface dirt. The work is in very good condition.
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The figure of Marie appears repeatedly throughout Maillol’s oeuvre and as a central figure in some of his most renowned works. For Maillol’s celebrated sculpture Les Trois nymphes the artist began by casting the central standing nymph and then used his maid Marie as the model for the two flanking figures. As was his general practice, Maillol would begin by modelling the torsos and would later add the head and limbs. Waldemar George notes that Maillol’s torsos “are organisms and are perhaps more complete than anatomies which imitate nature with its flaws, failings and imperfections” (quoted in Bertrand Lorquin, Aristide Maillol, Geneva, 1995, p. 107).

While visiting the Louvre with his patron Count Kessler, Maillol stopped in front of a statue of Venus that had lain in the sea off the coast of Africa for so long that its details had been rounded and smoothed by the force of the waves upon the sculpture’s surface. Turning to Count Kessler, Maillol explained, “This figure shows me what is the essential plastic quality of a work of art. A sculpture must be beautiful even after the original surface has been lost and it has been word down like a sea shell. This means that the essence of beauty endures all the same when one is in the presence of a true sculpture which possess this miracle of harmony between the masses” (quoted in ibid., p. 11).