Dali House

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.

A succession of visitors came here too – friends, models, patrons and foreign personalities including George Bernard Shaw and, in 1908, England’s King Edward VII, who made a special trip just to see Rodin (the monarch’s mistress, the Countess of Warwick, had sat for the sculptor).

Among the works on view in the villa grounds today is this one, “The Walking Man”. Always innovative, Rodin made critics wince by presenting headless sculptures – or just the heads, no doubt the direct result of having found new way of looking at the damaged statues of antiquity.

In “The Walking Man”, he deliberately pooled natural and unnatural by combining the classically modelled legs of another of his works, “Saint John the Baptist Preaching”, with a cracked and roughly executed torso.

In 1877 Rodin removed the lance from “The Age of Bronze”, leaving the figure’s arm raised without reason, and three years later relieved the Baptist of his cross. These items were, he felt, superfluous, or at least too explanatory for sculpture that was better left open to interpretation. Pure creation was what he had in mind, not storytelling.

There was a heart-rending story behind “The Burghers of Calais”, but Rodin found a radical way to portray of the drama that occurred in 1347, during the Hundred Years War, when England’s King Edward III agreed to end his brutal seige of the city after 11 months brutal months on the condition that six of Calais’ wealthiest citizens brought him the keys to the city.

The starving citizens were gathered in the town square to hear the terms, and these are the men who stepped forward, were stripped to their shirts and had nooses placed around their necks before they began walking toward the English camp. In the event their lives were spared at the urging of England’s queen.

Rodin won the city’s competition for the commission in 1884 by presenting the scene in a uniquely moving fashion. He depicted the burghers not confronting Edward, as had always been the case, but just starting out on their presumed march to death. Nor did he want the figures on a pedestal, but rather arrayed on the ground, so that “they would have been, as it were, mixed with the daily life of the town: passers-by would have elbowed them, and they would have felt through this contact the emotion of the living past in their midst”.

The sculpture on view today at the Villa des Brillants is identified as “Jean d’Aire”, suggesting that rather than a copy of the group monument, seen above, there is a single figure, that of the second man to step forward and volunteer his life for the city. Rodin’s later versions showed the men naked rather than in long nightshirts.

The Pavillion de l’Alma, where his works had been displayed at the 1900 World’s Fair, was rebuilt here afterward. The German Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), not yet the great poet, came to Paris to write a monograph on Rodin and stayed to assist him and learn from him the value of “objective observation”. Rilke likened the effect of the statuary in the pavilion, “this vast, bright hall [to] fauna in an aquarium”.

Until his death Rodin continued to extend the property, and between 1907 and 1910 reconstructed portions of the Chateau d’Issy-les-Moulineaux, the 17th-century home of the Conde family that had been burned down during the 1871 Commune.

In 1931, with the estate now in the state’s hands, the chateau-cum-museum was demolished for safety’s sake since the Pavillon de l’Alma had not been built to last. It was replaced by a larger building fitted behind the pediment of the Chateau d’Issy. The museum was restored in 1945 and finally inaugurated in 1948. The entire property was classified as an historical monument in 1972.

The villa itself and its furnishings were renovated in phases and in 1953 the ground floor opened to the public. The space was doubled in the early 1980s so that the collections could be completely reorganised. On the first floor visitors can see his furnished bedroom, including the bed from where he used to admire the Seine, and covering an entire wall, a huge 15th-century Christ.

For Auguste Rodin, the new century brought large exhibitions of his work, not just in France but in Prague as well.

In 1908, at the suggestion of his secretary Rilke, Rodin moved into the historic Hôtel Biron, with its elegant villa and sumptuous landscaping. When war came in 1914, he and Rose fled to England, and later stays Rome, where he executed a bust of Pope Benoît XV, but the returned to Paris as soon as they could.

The Hôtel Biron on rue de Varenne was completed in 1730 as a home for Abraham Peyrenc de Moras, a wigmaker who’d made a killing in currency speculation. He didn’t get to enjoy it for long, and his widow rented it to Louis XIV’s daughter-in-law. On her death in 1753 the property was sold to the maréchal de Biron, who gave it his name and built himself one of best parks in Paris.

He passed the estate on to his nephew, the duc de Lauzun, who, despite being a war hero, was guillotined in 1793, and then it was rental time again, for public balls inside and fairs outside. The grounds were pretty messed up by the time a papal legation moved in, followed by the Russian ambassador.

In 1820 it was handed over to the Société du Sacré-Coeur de Jésus, devoted to the austere education of young female aristocrats. The Mother Superior had all the panelling, mirrors and paintings ripped out. That lasted until 1905, when France legally separated church and state and took the place over.

Slated for demolition, the “hotel” meanwhile served as a temporary home to Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse and lsadora Duncan, who had a dancing school here, as well as Rodin, who occupied the suite of south-facing drawing-rooms in 1908 while also living at the Villa des Brillants in Meudon.

In 1916 Rodin – photographed here at the Biron with the Duchesse de Choiseul – suffered the last in a series of strokes, this one rendering him unable to work, and in a feeble mental state he signed away his entire collection of art and antiquities to the government, voiding prior wills that had named friends and associates as the beneficiaries. Only Rose would be otherwise remembered.

In return the National Assembly approved the establishment of the Musée Rodin at the Hôtel Biron. The Google Earth image here shows the original “Thinker” on the museum grounds.

The government took three years to live up to its end of the bargain, by which time Rodin was dead. But today the Musée Rodin draws an average of 500,000 visitors a year, so who gets the last laugh?

The winter that followed found both Auguste and Rose huddled for warmth in the Meudon villa, war rationining having left heating fuel scarce. At the suggestion of Judith Cladel, the writer who promoted his work early on, Rodin married Rose on January 29, 1917. The day before the wedding, the water pipes froze and burst, flooding the drawing room.

Two weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Rose died, even as workmen began carting the widower’s valuables off to the Hôtel Biron. Seeing his wife’s gothic crucifix being carried from her bedroom, Rodin flew into a rage. Cladel stepped in to ensure the cross stayed.

Rodin was allowed a visit to the Hôtel Biron just once a month. In April he was asked to sign another will to confirm the executors of the Musée Rodin, and after that he was not allowed to have a pen or pencil, lest he write yet another will.

Auguste Rodin died at Meudon on November 17. A plaster cast was made of his hand and later combined with “Small Torso A”, a fragment originally created for “The Gates of Hell”.

The funeral on November 24 was attended by 26,000 people. Watching the proceedings was a large copy of The Thinker, and he’s still sitting there today, contemplating a life cast in genius and despair.

Admirers of Rodin are just putting the finishing touches to a new website that promises to be comprehensive. Meanwhile there is much to see online thanks to the Cantor Foundation and the Musée Rodin itself.