the sculptor's business

Queen Victoria by Alfred Gilbert, 1903, Newcastle

I have recently been rereading biographies of C19 sculptors-Alfred Gilbert and Auguste Rodin.

Their contrasting circumstances and characters and the ways in which they made their careers shed much light on the idea of the public sculpture.
As characters they could hardly have been more different. I would say that Gilbert was a self-dramatising extrovert and that Rodin tended more to introversion. Their families suffered considerably either way. Both  men were extremely hard working and both were laws unto themselves when it came to working on commisssions.

Rodin had the advantage of working in a culture where the state was highly interventionist and considered it important to provide studios where sculptors could work on government commissions.The  French sculptor could rely on a culture richly endowed with craftsmen. The pointers, mouleurs and bronze casters were all readily available He did not need to rent anywhere special to work on the Gates of Hell. Gilbert had to find his own workplace and his extravagant construction of a home and studio must have been one of the major factors which led to his insolvency and residence abroad.

To some extent Rodin and Gilbert shared a tendency to throw themselves into their work. Gilbert had a tendency to either wish to carry on working after an object was accepted and paid for-or to draw out a commission so long that he upset his patrons became quite irritated with him. The best example is the tomb of the Duke of Clarence which dragged on for years and must have seriously alienated the Royal Family.

 Rodin could drag things out too. This is illustrated through his attitude to the Balzac monument which was commissioned by a literary society. Rodin became obsessed with the project and consulted every possible visual and documentary source-even to the extent of travelling to Balzac's native region to look for similar physical types. All this turned out expensive for Rodin when his patrons became more and more anxious and eventually the commisssion was cancelled . And in the end the extraordinary image was too much for the literary society. They got someone else to do the work.

Gilbert was quite likely to spend  his fee and procrastinate when reminded that work was due. Rodin had a tendency to quote vague or inadequate fees in his enthusiasm for a project. His financial extravagance in older years was the purchase of antiquities -or what he thought were antiquities for exorbitant prices.


Alfred Gilbert, by Richard Dorment, 1985
Rodin:the shape of Genius,by Ruth Butler, 1993.
Rodin:by Frederic Grunfeldt, 1987.
Just how Butler manages to omit Rodin's encounter with the Cambodian dancers bemuses me still....