Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Balzac, étude type C, grand modèle. Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2014.

signed 'A. Rodin' (on the top of the base); inscribed with foundry mark '.Georges Rudier. .Fondeur.Paris.' (on the back of the base); inscribed and dated '© by Musée Rodin 1971' (on the right side of the base); with raised signature 'A. Rodin' (on the underside), bronze with brown and green patina. Height: 50¼ in. (127.7 cm.). Conceived in 1892; this bronze version cast in 1971. Estimate $300,000 – $400,000

Provenance: Musée Rodin, Paris.
Slatkin Galleries, New York (acquired from the above, August 1971).
Vivendi Universal Corporate (Seagram) Collection, New York.
Acquired from the above by the family of the late owner, circa 2002.
PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF EDGAR M. BRONFMAN

Literature: G. Grappe, Catalogue du Musée Rodin, Paris, 1927, p. 73, no. 189 (another cast illustrated).
A.E. Elsen, Rodin, New York, 1963, p. 219 (larger version illustrated, p. 95).
I. Jianou and C. Goldscheider, Rodin, Paris, 1967, p. 107.
A.T. Spear, Rodin Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, 1967, p. 21, no. IV (larger version illustrated, pl. 34).
A.E. Elsen, Rodin and Balzac, Los Angeles, 1973, p. 69, no. 27 (larger version illustrated).
J.L. Tancock, The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin, Philadelphia, 1976, p. 425, no. 73 (plaster version illustrated, p. 427).
A.E. Elsen, Rodin's Art, The Rodin Collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, New York, 2003, p. 403, no. 109 (large bronze version illustrated, pp. 367 and 403).
A. Le Normand-Romain, The Bronzes of Rodin, Catalogue of Works in the Musée Rodin, Paris, 2007, vol. I, p. 167, no. S. 1074 (another cast illustrated, p. 166).

Notes: This work will be included in the forthcoming Auguste Rodin catalogue critique de l'oeuvre sculpté currently being prepared by the Comité Auguste Rodin at Galerie Brame et Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2002-525B.

In 1891 the Société des Gens de Lettres, then headed by Emile Zola, commissioned Rodin to execute a monument to the writer Honoré de Balzac. The Société stipulated that they wanted Balzac represented in the loose monk's robes he preferred to wear while writing. Rodin plunged into the task of learning everything he could about the late writer. As Athena Tacha Spear has written, "He read all of Balzac's novels and biographies; he looked at many of the portraits made during the writer's lifetime; he traveled often around Tours, Balzac's homeland, to study the physiognomy of the people and the nature of that region; he even obtained the proportions of Balzac's body from his tailor and thus was able to employ the appropriate models" (op. cit., 1967, pp. 9-10).

Over the next seven years, Rodin made more than fifty studies. Balzac, étude type C, grand modèle comes from fairly early on in Rodin's explorations of his subject. As was Rodin's habit, he began with the study of a nude in order to dress the figure in the final version. With his legs wide apart and his muscular arms crossed over his chest, Balzac gives the viewer the impression of a powerful wrestler. He is middle-aged and at the height of his creative power. Rather than romanticizing the writer, Rodin portrays him naturalistically and with dynamic expression. The contemporary critic, C. Chincholle, wrote, "During the year 1892... the artist conceived a strange Balzac in the attitude of a wrestler, seeming to defy the world. He had placed over very wide-spread legs an enormous belly. More concerned with a perfect resemblance than with the usual conception of Balzac, he made him shocking, deformed, his head sunk into his shoulders..." (quoted in "Balzac et Rodin," Le Figaro, 25 November 1894). This was revolutionary for the period in which luminaries were traditionally idealized in monumental sculpture, making Balzac, étude type C, grand modèle an landmark departure from the art historical canon.

Christie's. IMPRESSIONIST & MODERN DAY SALE INCLUDING PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF EDGAR M. BRONFMAN, 7 May 2014, New York, Rockefeller Plaza - http://www.christies.com/