16 3/4 x 11 7/8 ins
Signed and inscribed:
Dessin fait pour Monsieur Arthur Mayer et sa fille Jacqueline Meyer et en homage d’admiration au grand artiste Gustave Doré trop oublié, Auguste Rodin Juin 1908’.
This wonderful drawing with its moving tribute to Gustave Doré shows the three towering figures in Rodin’s major sculpture The Gates of Hell looking down upon the wreathing ferment of damned souls. The drawing was inserted as the frontispiece of Arthur Mayer’s copy of his publication of Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. The three figures, in the drawing and sculpture, are reproduced above.
The Gates of Hell: What They are About and Something of Their History is a key text by the great Rodin scholar Albert Elsen who writes:
‘The crucial connection he [Rodin] discovered between subjects from the past and present was suffering: the eternal and internal punishment inflicted by unsatisfied passions……Rodin’s compassionate commentary on the moral cost to society of the decline of orthodox religion and the addiction to materialistic values.’
Rodin told a writer:
I lived a whole year with Dante, drawing the eight circles of his Hell. At the end of that year, I saw that while my drawings rendered my vision of Dante, they were not close enough to reality. And I began all over again, after nature, working with my models. I abandoned my drawings from Dante.
What he told Truman Bartlett [the American sculptor] however about how he formed ‘The Gates of Hell’ shows an awareness of his greatest gift:
I followed my imagination, my own sense of arrangement, movement and composition.
‘The Gates of Hell’ was only cast after Rodin’s death in 1917.
Signed and inscribed:
Dessin fait pour Monsieur Arthur Mayer et sa fille Jacqueline Meyer et en homage d’admiration au grand artiste Gustave Doré trop oublié, Auguste Rodin Juin 1908’.
This wonderful drawing with its moving tribute to Gustave Doré shows the three towering figures in Rodin’s major sculpture The Gates of Hell looking down upon the wreathing ferment of damned souls. The drawing was inserted as the frontispiece of Arthur Mayer’s copy of his publication of Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. The three figures, in the drawing and sculpture, are reproduced above.
The Gates of Hell: What They are About and Something of Their History is a key text by the great Rodin scholar Albert Elsen who writes:
‘The crucial connection he [Rodin] discovered between subjects from the past and present was suffering: the eternal and internal punishment inflicted by unsatisfied passions……Rodin’s compassionate commentary on the moral cost to society of the decline of orthodox religion and the addiction to materialistic values.’
Rodin told a writer:
I lived a whole year with Dante, drawing the eight circles of his Hell. At the end of that year, I saw that while my drawings rendered my vision of Dante, they were not close enough to reality. And I began all over again, after nature, working with my models. I abandoned my drawings from Dante.
What he told Truman Bartlett [the American sculptor] however about how he formed ‘The Gates of Hell’ shows an awareness of his greatest gift:
I followed my imagination, my own sense of arrangement, movement and composition.
‘The Gates of Hell’ was only cast after Rodin’s death in 1917.