This sheet belongs to Rodin’s so-called transitional period, dating to the early 1890s. During these years in which the artist worked at 182 rue de l’Université in Paris, Rodin received a steady stream of models whose features he noted on index cards. The artist progressively moved away from the densely worked “black drawings” associated with the Porte de l’Enfer toward a lighter, more fluid graphic idiom that would come to define his mature style. While his earlier drawings often evoke mythological or literary sources, his transitional works are grounded in direct observation, capturing models in unposed, spontaneous attitudes.
As Christina Buley-Uribe has observed, many drawings from this phase depict women with a “medieval Eve-like beauty”: slender bodies with small breasts, a softly rounded abdomen, a warm roseate complexion, and long fair hair. Rodin encouraged his models to perform ordinary gestures, hoping to seize a movement unmediated by theatrical posing. As he explained in an 1898 interview with Maurice Guillemot for Gil Blas: “They always want to pose; I tell them: make the gesture of combing your hair… but no, really comb your hair, as you normally would, and only then I will seize the truth”. 1
On our sheet, the same figure is drawn twice as she tends her long blond hair, each study adjusted through subtle variations in position and degree of finish. The brighter yellows and soft pinks animating the more developed figure on the right are characteristic of the artist’s transitional palette. The use of squared paper, frequently employed in his earlier “Inferno” drawings of the 1880s, further supports an early date within this phase.
In 1907, Rodin gifted our drawing to Maurice Fenaille, one of his most important patrons. An industrialist and noted art historian, Fenaille began collecting Rodin’s work in the mid-1880s and went on to acquire a distinguished group of marbles, terracottas, and a portrait of his wife. He played a central role in championing Rodin’s draftsmanship, notably by editing the influential Album Goupil (1897), the first publication to reproduce a substantial body of the artist’s drawings. Fenaille assembled an important collection of Rodin’s works on paper, many of which were later donated to the Musée Rodin and other French institutions. The inscription on the verso indicates that this sheet formed part of a larger group the artist presented to him in 1907, the same year the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune mounted the first exhibition devoted exclusively to Rodin’s drawings.
1 From a letter by Rodin dated 20 February 1898: “[elles] veulent toujours poser; je leur dit: Faites le geste de vous coiffer…. mais non, coiffez vous réellement, pour de vrai, et je saisis alors la vérité”.