Conceived between 1887 and 1895, the five sculptures presented here were created by Rodin in this particular size between 1895-1903. All cast in 1927 and 1928 these works share a unified provenance and present a rare opportunity to acquire all five of the Bourgeois de Calais in this size (the sixth figure from the full-scale monument, that of Jacques de Wissant, does not exist in this size). Specific details of each of the bronzes can be found below.
Auguste Rodin’s Bourgeois de Calais is not only one of the artist’s greatest works in a long and storied career but is also one of the most famous public monuments ever erected (see Fig. 1). A daring departure from the mythic idealization normally depicted in this type of public commission, it broke centuries of precedent, paving the way for the modernism and abstraction that would come to the fore over the course of the twentieth century.
A less likely subject than for such a break with visual norms could hardly be imagined—a group of six prosperous townspeople, shorn of their rank and position, offering themselves as a sacrifice to preserve the lives of the denizens of their city, which had been wasted by a year-long siege; an event—the capitulation of the French city of Calais to the English—that took place in 1347. It took two hundred years for Calais to return to French control and more than five hundred years before the city would commission a monument to the six townspeople who had marched out from the walls with the full expectation of losing their lives.
Most public monuments sought to honor their subject(s) through idealization and glorification. The long tradition of Equestrian sculpture in the West, from classical antiquity until the waning of large-scale monarchical powers, was a preferred mode of portrayal. Even Joan of Arc, a commoner who also fought the English during the Hundred Years’ War, was most often depicted in armor astride a horse (see Fig. 2). Rodin, instead, showed his subjects at their most vulnerable. In Jean Froissart’s fourteenth-century text Les Chroniques de France he writes that the King of England said to his equerry “Sir Walter, you will tell the people of Calais and their governor that the greatest favor they can expect from me is that six of the chief burghers of the city shall come out, their heads and feet bare, and with halters round their necks and wit the keys of the town and castle in their hands. These will be at my mercy and the rest of the town shall go free” (reproduced in Antoinette Le Normand-Romain and A. Haudiquet, Rodin The Burghers of Calais, Paris, 2001, p. 7). It is these bare-headed, bare-foot figures, wearing rough cloth with ropes around their necks that perfectly capture the event which inspired the need for a monument in the first place.
Instead of looking at his contemporaries or the more renowned painters of the Salon, Rodin references Donatello’s Prophets from the Baptistry in Florence (see Fig. 3) and, while Donatello’s figures were set into the building’s facade, conceptualized the height of display for his monument near the ground. This idea of placement near the floor allowed a more direct and realistic confrontation between sculpture and viewer, such as that found in entombment scenes in medieval churches (see Fig. 4). Rodin would, initially, be disappointed in the base created for his monumental Burghers. The city of Calais set them on an elevated pedestal.
As would be the case with Rodin’s most important sculptural projects throughout his career, this monument would be beset by delays, some of which had to do with political and stylistic opinion of the city of Calais and others of which were purely related to financial conditions. Several years into this project a major financial crisis swept the country with businesses and banks defaulting rapidly. Rodin continued his work, however, starting, as was his habit, with sculpting bodies in the nude, often from live models. When he had arrived at a figure he was satisfied with, after examining different aspects from torso, to hands to face, he would progress to the next figure. Close examination of the six figures shows some commonalities—the same hand is used in several figures and the model for the faces of some of the Burghers was the same (though in one case he is bearded, in another clean shaven). In this way Rodin created physical harmony between the figures while portraying positions, countenances and drapery to different effects that, considering a number of the Burghers were related to each other, provides a historical echo of reality.
When it came t.mes to cast the figures Rodin draped the nude plasters in some form of cloth. According to Antoinette Le Normand-Romain: “These tunics were real shirts, arranged on plaster models of nudes and later cast” (Antoinette Le Normand-Romain and A. Haudiquet, Rodin The Burghers of Calais, Paris, 2001, p. 26). Mary L. Levkoff has instead suggested that “Rodin’s commitment to naturalism was affirmed at the most fundamental level, as he developed his figures from nude models, which were then draped in canvas saturated with wet plaster” (Mary L. Levkoff, Rodin in His t.mes , Los Angeles, 1994). Whatever the specifics of the casting of figures’ clothing, the technique of incorporating real objects into the artist’s casting process is in keeping with his practice.
Rodin debuted several of the figures for the monument in exhibitions of his work and, in 1899, showed the full plaster group at his joint exhibition with Claude Monet at the Galerie Georges Petit. The following year the plaster would again be shown, this t.mes
at Rodin’s solo exhibition in a pavilion he constructed at the Place de l’Alma; coinciding with the Paris Exposition Universelle a more auspicious t.mes
to display the breadth of the body of his work would have been hard to imagine. Prior to the plaster’s exhibition in 1899, only the town of Calais had displayed the full group in its entirety. With its finances finally in order, the first bronze was cast in 1895, placed and inaugurated that same year. An additional three casts were created during Rodin’s lifet.mes
. Today, the editions of the monument, twelve in all, are held in museum collects
ions around the world.