With his torso dramatically twisted and his right hand raised to shield his anguished, grief-stricken face, Pierre de Wiessant, vêtu, Grand Modèle stands as one of the most expressive and emotionally resonant figures within 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 – Jean de Fiennes, vêtu, Grand Modèle – Pierre de Wiessant, vêtu, Grand Modèle is a rare monumental example cast in an edition of 12 unique originals in 1982 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, including the Norton Simon Museum, California; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Rodin’s celebrated monument – and with it, the figure of Pierre de Wiessant – 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.

In the First Maquette, Pierre Wiessant (seen on the extreme left) – the fourth burgher to volunteer for sacrifice and one of the two youngest in the group – is seen as a young man, looking outwards and pointing with his arm to himself, as if questioning the fate that had befallen him. In the second maquette, as Mary Jo Mcnamara notes, “he steps forward, swinging his body gracefully to the left in the posture that he will retain through the final monument... He no longer looks out, but twists his neck to look over his right shoulder at the ground, resulting in a more introspective quality as the figure seems to withdraw into itself. No longer pointing to himself, he holds his arm stiffly with the fingers slightly curled in an enigmatic gesture” (Ibid., p. 42).

In line with the academic tradition, Rodin 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. Several nude studies of Pierre de Wiessant executed following the creation of the First Maquette for the monument – some conceived as work-in-progress fragments and others executed as full figures with arms and heads – allow to trace the evolution of this character’s form towards its final version.

The most important alteration is evidently in the change of the model Rodin employed to represent Pierre Wiessant. Depicted as a slender youth with a full head of curly hair in the earlier études and the First Maquette, Rodin later conceived him as a more physically developed, vigorous young male, with a distinctly more muscular torso and shorter hair. As Rodin’s concept evolved, Pierre de Wiessant’s head and body adopted a more expressive and emotionally intense character. A noticeable dramatic twist in his upper body, coupled with more animated hand gestures, imbued the figure with a powerful sense of movement and a unique emotional charge.

As Joan Vita Miller and Gary Marotta note, “Rodin did not fully resolve the character of Pierre de Wiessant until the final figure. This he achieved by physical changes: the neck, unencumbered by rope as in The Second Maquette, is elongated, with tendons strained; muscles are more developed and defined; expressive hands and arms show protruding veins. The simple drapery of the earlier study is gone, replaced by broad planes of cloth with deep recesses to capture shadow. The drama and movement thus created underscore Pierre's anguish” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rodin: The B. Gerald Cantor collects ion, 1986, pp. 61-62).

Particularly striking is Pierre Wiessant’s head, which in the final version evolved to fully capture the powerful drama of the moment. The model was likely the actor Coquelin Cadet who as Catherine Lampert writes, “volunteered to collaborate, enthusing: ‘Would you like me to pose as a man of the people? I was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, and I am therefore a true son of the Pas de Calais. It would be perfectly natural, and it would give me pleasure to be a model for a great sculpture.’ Capable of holding an expression of interior anguish… Cadet seemed to draw in air to feed his soul through all his orifices; thus the ears are tipped forward, the bony nose has distended nostrils, the lips part and eyelids nearly close” (Exh. Cat., London, The Hayward Gallery, Rodin Sculpture & Drawings, London, 1986, p. 106). Throughout his career, Rodin was interested in the renewal that a change of scale brings to sculpture, and Pierre de Wiessant’s head – which he evidently viewed as incredibly important, based on the number of studies he produced for it – was one of the works Rodin enlarged in the early 1900s to exhibit as an independent sculpture.

Describings the final version of Pierre de Wiessant – which the present cast represents – Antoinette Le Normand-Romain and Annette Haudiquet have aptly remarked: “Pierre de Wiessant offers the image of suffering in the extreme. His body, bent, like a taut bow, vibrates with pain, his hands, opening like flowers, sing out” (A. Le Normand-Romain and A. Haudiquet, Rodin The Burghers of Calais, Paris, 2001, p. 52).

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 profound 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. These two major sources of inspiration come together in all of Rodin’s six figures, but it is, arguably, in the figure of Pierre de Wiessant where this concurrent influence – Gothic solemnity coupled with the Renaissance focus on physical movement to convey psychological complexity – is most apparent, resulting in a rendering of exceptional power and expressivity.

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 Pierre de Wiessant, vêtu, Grand Modèle, which the present owner acquired directly from Musée Rodin, is unprecedented. Among the six figures, Pierre de Wiessant emerges as the character whose striking pose perhaps most vividly encapsulates the profound internal conflict experienced by the burghers as they faced the prospect of self-sacrifice for the collects ive good. It is through Pierre de Wiessant’s figure that the full extent of the raw humanity Rodin instilled in the sculptural form becomes most apparent. This deeply human portrayal led the American sculptor Truman H. Bartlett to observe in 1889 that, despite their monumental scale, none of the burghers appear “godlike”; rather, they are “intensely, and almost brutally human” (Ibid.).