(Probably) Auguste Beuret, Paris (the artist's son)
Loïe Fuller, Paris
Jean & Paule Cailac, Paris
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Executed on cream squared wove paper, not laid down, affixed to the mount with plastic transparent supports and floating in its mount. All four edges are unevenly cut. The upper right and lower right and left tips are folded. Recto: There are a few flattened creases and handling marks in places. The sheet is light stained. Verso: There are a few flattened creases and handling marks in places. The sheet is slightly light stained. This work is in overall good condition.
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A hitherto unknown group of twenty-seven sketches from an album by Rodin and a watercolour that belonged to Guillaume Apollinaire have recently been found in a private collection. It is a rare group of works, both in number and quality and only partially known, as some of these lots were purchased by the expert Jean Cailac, who sold them through different auctions in the 1930s and ten or so drawings from this same group again appeared on the art market in 2016.[1] Moreover our twenty-seven sketches came with a particularly interesting original certificate. The document is dated March 1^st 1918: “Received from Miss Fuller, the sum of one thousand five hundred French Francs for 39 drawings in a sketchbook/73 units/ 1 book of decorations. These drawings come from the Rodin family and are guaranteed to be by the artist Rodin.” This receipt indicates two remarkable things about the provenance of these drawings: the “Rodin” family – probably Auguste Beuret (1866-1934), Rodin’s illegitimate son conceived with his companion Rose. The receipt also mentions the name of Loïe Fuller (1962-1928), the famous American dancer and choreographer who was both Rodin’s model and his first agent in the United States.[2] The twenty-seven drawings mostly date from the 1880s, when the sculptor was working on The Gates of Hell and reflect his research for this State commission for a decorative gate intended for a future museum of the decorative arts. For this immense bas-relief, Rodin took his inspiration from Dante’s Divine Comedy. “I lived an entire year with Dante, he later confided to Serge Basset, living only from him and with him, drawing the eight circles of his Hell.”

The drawings and monotypes of horsemen, centaurs and horse races are extremely rare on the art market and relate to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text Rodin also used as a source for his Gates. Rodin carefully kept his studies of hippodromes and referred to them when he was making groups of centaurs abducting women which were to frame the bas-relief heads of the Pleureuses (Weepers). The marvelous monotype of Cavalier enlevant une femme (Horseman abducting a Woman) is particularly moving. However, it is probably a studio sketch, made on the back of the rough draft for a letter where Rodin mentions Camille Claudel whom he met in 1882.

The energetic runners, the airy, suspended characters, the slender figures, the dynamic skaters, were made to jut out of the frontal structure of the Gates of Hell. These drawings are significant in Rodin’s work of the 1880s. They belong to an iconography of small Mercury and Sprite figures illustrating the Shades that peopled the underground world. Some are similar to the drawings Rodin selected for the Goupil Album published in 1897.

One must imagine that all these drawings, as small as they are, were cut out and carefully brought together by Rodin in albums which are today disassembled. They were originally taken from sketchbooks, always close to hand, veritable “traveling portable studios” as Donat Rütman appropriately named them. The album from which our sketches originate was most probably made for the Gates, even though all of Rodin’s albums include a varied selection of drawings which explains the presence in this group of the façade of a baroque palace, very probably the Institut, of a Homme canon (Canonical Man) or even a kind of Centaure à patte de lion bandant sa blessure (Centaur with a lion’s paw bandaging his wound).

The watercolour of Femme à la chevelure blonde belonged to Apollinaire and is part of a different series in Rodin’s work termed “transition” drawings (the 1880s) which can be distinguished by their light, luminous and often fluorescent colours. It was a period when the artist focused on the intimate world of the woman, working in his own words to “reproduce the truth”, without “correcting nature” but by “incorporating himself in it”. The models posed in natural positions. They arrived fully dressed at the studio and undressed in front of him with a great variety of gestures, letting their dresses fall to their ankles, drawing them across their hips or pulling them over their heads. Rodin drew his model in disregard of idealization or esthetic convention. We know that Apollinaire owned at least two “transition” drawings, but nothing is known about the eventual relationship between the artist and the writer, or how he acquired these works.[3] It may have been through Marie Laurencin, who was his mistress, or Loië Fuller, two artists he greatly admired. In his Meditations esthétiques (Esthetic Meditations) in 1913, Apollinaire wrote: “Mr Mario Meunier, who was then Mr Rodin’s secretary and had produced excellent translations of Sappho, Sophocles and Plato, told an amusing story about one of Mlle Laurencin’s most tender paintings , La Toilette. He was showing the sculptor some photographs of Fauvist paintings, among which there also happened to be a picture of a painting by Mlle Laurencin. ‘At least, said the illustrious old man, this one isn’t some twittering fauvette; she knows what grace means, she is serpentine.” That is absolutely right. Female painting is serpentine, and the precursor of today’s female art may well have been that great artist of movement and colour, Loië Fuller, who invented lighting effects combining grace, painting and dance, and which were indeed known as the Serpentine Dance. And Rodin was referring to the work of another woman when he perspicaciously came up with that particular word!”

Loïe Fuller, whom Rodin met in around 1893-1896, played a significant role in the artist’s esthetic research during this “transition” period. With her twirling veils and extravagant scenic effects, she impressed artists and writers of her time by using the different technological possibilities of electrical light and colour for the first time on stage. The “transition” drawings reveal Loië Fuller’s influence on Rodin. The mention of her name in the receipt that accompanies this group of drawings also indicates her essential role in the prestigious reputation of Rodin’s drawings both with dealers of French art and private American collectors. In his Divagations (1897), Stéphane Mallarmé made a attempt to translate into words the effect of this surprising “actress” that spread across Paris at the end of the century: “In that terrible bath of materials swoons the radiant, cold dancer, illustrating countless themes of gyration, acrobatics of a weft spread far, giant petals and butterflies, conch or unfurling, all of a neat and elementary order. She blends with the rapidly changing colours which vary their limelight phantasmagoria of twilight and grotto, their rapid, emotional changes – delight, mourning, anger, and to set these off, prismatic, either violent or dilute as they are, there must be the dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” It is thus easy to understand the value of this group of drawings, as they are endowed with the singular presence of both Guillaume Apollinaire’s and Loïe Fuller’s shadows.

Christina Buley-Uribe

[1] Leclère Auction, « Dessins anciens et modernes », March 31st 2016, hôtel Drouot, room 15, lots 168 to 180.

[2] See C. Buley-Uribe, Mes sœurs divines. Rodin et 99 femmes de son entourage. Paris, Editions du Relief, 2013

[3] Auction Etude Couteau Nicolay, « Exceptionnel ensemble provenant de l’ancienne collection de Guillaume Apollinaire », June 25th 1986, hôtel Drouot, room n°3, n°155 under the title « Femme nue dansant ».






This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue raisonné des dessins et peintures d’Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) being prepared by Christina Buley-Uribe under the archive number 180316.