Rodin: The shape of things, part 2
Continued from here.
In 1894 Rodin visited Claude Monet’s lush estate in Giverney, where he met Paul Cézanne. The painter’s country garden may have spurred him to buy the Villa des Brillants in Meudon, which he’d been renting since 1893. Here he began amassing his collection of antiques and paintings.
This Louis XIII villa of red stone and brick stands on a rise overlooking the Val Fleury, its vast grounds sloping to the River Seine. The sculptor gradually made it a workplace, buying neighbouring homes and turning them into studios and offices to accommodate the 50 or so assistants he employed by 1900.
One room became “the studio of antiquities”, a gallery for his work and the Old World pieces he collected, and elsewhere hung paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, among others.
Until 1900, although Rodin continued to spend every day at his Paris studios, it was in the intimacy of Meudon that he accomplished his most creative work. See the rest.
