Conceived in 1904, this monumental work was never cast in Rodin's lifetime but was only cast as an edition of 13 by the Rodin Museum from the original plaster given to them by Rodin on his death in 1917. There are therefore only 13 bronze casts of this work in the world, 7 of which are in Museum Collections.
This present work derives from the figure of the L'homme Qui Tombe situated underneath the lintel of the tympanum of Gates of Hell. In 1882, Rodin extracted this figure and joined it with Femme Accroupie, another motif from Gates of Hell, in order to create the figure group called Je Suis Belle, named after the first line of a Baudelaire poem inscribed on the base. Later the male torso was used in further figure groupings—one, at the request of Rodin's patron Anthony Roux, showing combat with a snake—until eventually it became a separate torso. In this truncated form it has been produced twice, the present version, monumental 43 inches, first exhibited in Dusseldorf in 1904 and known as Torse Louis XIV or Marsyas, and the other cast in the original dimensions.
Provenance
Musee Rodin, Paris
Feingarten Galleries, Los Angeles
Private Collection, United States
Literature
Normand-Romain, A. The Bronzes of Rodin, Paris, 2007, another cast in the Museum illustrated p.429
