Turning his strong, youthful figure to glance backwards, his mouth open and his arms outstretched in an utter bewilderment at his fate, Jean de Fiennes, vêtu, Grand Modèle masterfully captures the youngest of the six burghers forming part of Auguste Rodin’s epic sculptural ensemble, Les Bourgeois de Calais. Commissioned by the city of Calais in 1884 to commemorate the sacrifice of the six prosperous community leaders who voluntarily surrendered themselves to save the city’s citizens following a relentless, year-long siege of the city by the English in 1347, Les Bourgeois de Calais is universally regarded as one of Rodin’s most famous commissions and one of the most important public monuments within the history of modern art.

Together with another lot offered in this auction – Pierre de Wiessant, vêtu, Grand Modèle – Jean de Fiennes, vêtu, Grand Modèle is a rare monumental example cast in an edition of 12 unique originals in 1984 by the celebrated Coubertin Foundry for the Musée Rodin in Paris. Other examples from the same edition are housed in some of the biggest museums and public institutions around the world, including, among others, the Norton Simon Museum, California; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; The North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; The University of Boston, Massachusetts and The University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Rodin’s celebrated monument – and with it, the figure of Jean de Fiennes – underwent two significant evolutions before it took its final form. The First and Second Maquettes provide a fascinating insight into the evolution of the sculptor’s creative thought, with over one hundred three-dimensional studies of its various elements and variants surviving to this day.

The name of Jean de Fiennes does not appear in the celebrated account of the events by the historian of the Hundred Years' War Jean Froissart, in which only four of the burghers are mentioned by name. The names of the two unidentified volunteers, Jean de Fiennes and Andrieu d'Andres, were discovered in the Vatican Library only in 1863. However, scholars note that since Dormont de Belloy, the author of the famous French play on the subject from 1765, had made one of the burghers the son of Eustache de Saint Pierre (the first volunteer) in his script, it had become customary to portray one of them as an adolescent. With the figure of Jean de Fiennes, Rodin follows that tradition, depicting him as a youth.

While in one of the earlier variants for the Second Maquette Jean de Fiennes’ whole body is covered in heavy drapery, his physical pose appearing relatively restricted – Rodin here evidently focusing more on the figure’s internal turmoil and the way it reveals itself in his facial expression – in a later version, his pose is distinctly more outward (fig. 3). As Joan Vita Miller and Gary Marotta note in the catalogue of the seminal 1986 Metropolitan Museum exhibition dedicated to the ensemble, “Rodin assumed that Jean de Fiennes was the youngest of the burghers, and in The Second Maquette he portrays Jean as such, his boyish torso exposed, his arms extended palms up. Tattered drapery falls down his arms and around his feet, concealing his movement. With lips parted and brow furrowed, he, like his fellow adolescent Pierre de Wiessant in The First Maquette, questions his fate” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rodin: The B. Gerald Cantor collects ion, 1986, p. 65).

Writing about the same version, McNamara remarks: “Jean de Fiennes begins to walk forward but stops to look back. Unlike the other figures, he holds his arms out at his sides away from his body, creating a graceful arc from one arm to the other. His drapery seems more like liquid bronze in the fluidity of its lines.” (M. Jo McNamara and Albert Elsen, op. cit., p. 44).

A further existing study, this t.mes in the nude, brings to light Rodin’s working method, steeped in the academic tradition, whereby he would first develop his sculptures in the nude. Once the poses were worked out, he would drape them in tunics covered in wet plaster. This method allowed for the expressivity of the bodies to come through in the most realistic and compelling way.

In the figure’s final iteration, which the present work exemplifies, Jean de Fiennes’ pose remains largely consistent with that we can see in the Second Maquette. However, his head is now adorned with long, wavy hair, and the drapery is rendered with lighter fabric and vertical folds, revealing feet positioned as if to advance.

In all major literature on the history of the monument's conception, scholars have highlighted the fact that Jean de Fiennes’ figure seems to have undergone the most dramatic transformations throughout the course of Rodin’s work on the monument. Yet it is also evident that what remains is Rodin’s focus on highlighting Jean de Fiennes’ doubtful disposition as he is about to leave the town he may never return to, or a lover that he has resigned to leave behind forever.

As Miller and Marotta have aptly remarked, “If Pierre de Wiessant has acknowledged his fate, the younger Jean de Fiennes has not quite come to terms with it” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rodin: The B. Gerald Cantor collects ion, 1986, p. 65). His is the figure that Rodin employs to convey, with profound rawness and vulnerability, the unspeakable tragedy of youth that has resigned itself to death.

Editorial: Auguste Rodin, Francis Bacon and the Passion and Anguish of Bodies

Commissioned by the Calais officials in 1884, the monument to The Burghers of Calais was conceived in the context of a wider nineteenth-century governmental project designed to instill patriotism through public sculpture. This process coincided with the evolution of the concept of the nation in France, which as McNamara writes, had at the t.mes replaced “the German notion of nationality based on race and language with a mystical image of a nation as a spirit or soul. A nation was defined as a group of people possessing a common heritage” (op. cit., p. 11). Reeling after its recent defeat to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine that ensued, France was in urgent need of powerful narratives to restore unity and morale among the nation.

There are arguably few more courageous, nation-defining accounts in French history than the sacrifice of the burghers of Calais following the city’s year-long siege in 1347. This episode is well documented in the Chroniques written by Jean Froissart (1360-65), a fourteenth-century Valenciennes historian of the Hundred Years’ War:

Having been selected by the official committee in 1884 to create this critically important monument, Rodin took to its conception with great fervor and patriotic spirit. The early discussions about the monument revolved around concentrating on the figure of the first volunteer, Eustache de Saint Pierre, who had historically been at the epicentre of the narrative. Yet, from the outset, Rodin was eager to create a sculpture which would honour all six burghers, imbuing them with equal historical importance. Furthermore, while many historic images of the sacrifice focused on the scene of the burghers arriving to kneel before the English king, Rodin was eager to bring to light another moment: that of the six men leaving the market square, having just made the decision to sacrifice themselves and taking the first step towards their fate.

Ever captivated by sculpture’s potential as a vehicle of human emotion, Rodin saw in that moment – six common people coming to terms with the monumentality of their decision – a unique opportunity to convey in three-dimensional form the complexity of the feelings that each character would have experienced. As Rodin subsequently noted in his conversation with art critic Paul Gsell:

It is this focus – not on the elevation of these figures to the status of abstract heroes, but on their humanity in all its profound complexity and contradiction – which renders Rodin’s monument as a whole and the individual figures within it so profoundly relatable and universal.

The same motivation explains why in his inspiration Rodin deliberately looked not to contemporary examples of historic monuments – whose overtly elaborate style and hierarchical, pyramidal structures he criticised for their “coldness and a lack of movement” – but to art from the Gothic era, contemporaneous with Froissart’s account of the events. This is clearly visible in the solemnity and grace that define the figures, as well as the careful rendering of their flowing drapery, features that, as Catherine Lampert notes, bring “mystery, cadence and unity to the dense grouping of the monument” (Exh. Cat., London, The Hayward Gallery, Rodin Sculpture & Drawings, London, 1986, p. 105). Scholars have pointed to Gothic sculptors like Claus Sluter and the entombment groups from the era as key influences on Rodin’s vision for The Burghers of Calais.

At the same t.mes , the expressive intensity of the characters and Rodin’s preoccupation with capturing movement to convey psychological depth, also reveal the unmistakable influence of Italian Renaissance sculpture. The figures of the burghers recall the works of Michelangelo and Donatello, which Rodin would have encountered during his trip to Italy in 1876, as well as the works of Renaissance painters such as Raphael. Jean de Fiennes’s t.mes less yet profoundly expressive pose, coupled with the long curly hair that adorns his head, undoubtedly brings to mind depictions of Christ in the religious oils of the Renaissance period.

Forming part of Rodin’s most iconic public monument – for which the majority of final, full-scale editions are held in public institutions – the debut appearance on the market of the present monumental cast of Jean de Fiennes, vêtu, Grand Modèle, which the present owner acquired directly from Musée Rodin, is unprecedented.