The group – consigned from a distinguished private collection – is led by a rare, early cast of Le Penseur (‘The Thinker’) from 1906 (est. $8/12 million). Photo: Sotheby's.

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s will feature three exquisite bronzes from Auguste Rodin’s masterpiece The Gates of Hell in its Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 7 May 2013. The group – consigned from a distinguished private collection – is led by a rare, early cast of Le Penseur (‘The Thinker’) from 1906 (est. $8/12 million*). Renowned as an icon of art history, this composition numbers among the most celebrated sculptures ever created. Le Penseur will be on view in London from 12 – 16 April, before returning for exhibition in Sotheby’s York Avenue galleries beginning 3 May. 

Simon Shaw, Head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art department in New York, commented: “We are privileged to offer three of the finest sculptures by Rodin to appear at auction in recent years, on behalf of perhaps the finest private collection of his work. It is a pleasure to present such extraordinary casts in an increasingly sophisticated market, where distinctions of casting quality, patination, date and provenance are readily appreciated by collectors.” 

THE GATES OF HELL. Commissioned in 1880 and inspired by Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, the monumental portal known as La Porte de l’Enfer is the defining project of Auguste Rodin’s career. Although never fully realized, it is key to understanding his artistic aims: many of Rodin’s greatest sculptures derive from the single and multi-figural groups he created for the Gates, which occupied him tirelessly for 37 years. 

Undoubtedly the most famous of these works is Le Penseur, which formed the crowning apex in the tympanum above the doorway. The early cast on offer was made by the Alexis Rudier foundry in Paris (est. $8/12 million). It is on the original scale of the Gates, and was commissioned directly from the artist by publishing magnate Ralph Pulitzer in 1906. Uniquely, it bears a plaque affirming that the cast was made for Pulitzer under Rodin’s direct supervision. Sotheby’s set the auction record for Le Penseur in 2010, when a later cast sold for $11.8 million in New York. 

Along with Le Penseur, Le Baiser (‘The Kiss’) is Rodin’s best-loved sculpture. Where The Thinker represents the head, or reason, The Kiss is a canonical image of the heart. Originally intended for the left side of The Gates of Hell, the work portrays another scene from Dante’s Inferno: the ill-fated lovers Paolo and Francesca, shown in a passionate embrace. The superb bronze of Le Baiser on offer this May was cast in April 1909 (est. $800,000/1.2 million). 

Ugolin et ses enfants (‘Ugolino and His Children’) was cast only three times during Rodin’s lifetime – Sotheby’s is pleased to present the first of these, dating from 1883 (est. $800,000/1.2 million). This rare composition is a towering embodiment of pathos in sculptural form, depicting a complex multi-figural group. The cast on offer was commissioned from the Gonon foundry, by artist and patron Henry Lerolle, who also patronized Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas. It featured in a photographic self-portrait that Degas took in 1895 with Lerolle’s daughters. 

Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917), Le Penseur, taille de la porte dit moyen modèle. Photo: Sotheby's.

Inscribed A. Rodin and with the foundry mark Alexis Rudier Fondeur Paris; additionally inscribed on a plaque affixed to the rock Le Penseur: Executé en 1906 dans mes ateliers et sous ma surveillance pour Monsieur Ralph Pulitzer, Auguste Rodin. Bronze. Height: 28 1/8 in. 71.5 cm. Conceived in 1880, this cast executed between January and June, 1906. Estimation: 8,000,000 - 12,000,000 USD

This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Critique de l'œuvre sculpté d'Auguste Rodin currently beingprepared by Galerie Brame & Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2008-2108B.

PROVENANCE: Ralph Pulitzer, New York (acquired from the artist in 1906)
Private Collection (by descent from the above)
William S. Paley, New York
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the Estate of the above)
Acquired from the above in 1995

LITTERATURE: Georges Grappe, Catalogue du Musée Rodin, Paris, 1929, nos. 167-69, illustrations of the example at the Musée Rodin pp. 73-74
Henri Martinie, Auguste Rodin, Paris, 1949, no. 19, illustration of another cast
Albert E. Elsen, Rodin, New York, 1963, illustrations of other casts pp. 25, 52 & 53
Ionel Jianou and Cécile Goldscheider, Rodin, Paris, 1967, edition catalogued p. 88; illustration of another cast pl. 11
John L. Tancock, The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin, Philadelphia, 1976, edition catalogued and illustrations of other casts pp. 111-20
Albert E. Elsen, ed., Rodin Rediscovered, Washington, 1981, illustration of the clay version p. 67
Albert E. Elsen, The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin, Stanford, 1985, figs. 50 & 60, illustrations of the clay model pp. 56 & 71
Antoinette le Normand-Romain, ed., The Bronzes of Rodin, Catalogue of works in the Musée Rodin, vol. II, Paris, 2007, this cast listed p. 586, mentioned p. 594, illustrations of another cast p. 584-85

NOTE: Rodin’s Le Penseur has become one of the most recognizable sculptures in art history. The works pertinence to Rodin's contemporaries was immediate and its continued relevance in today's visual culture has solidified the sculpture's legacy. Though he firmly grounded Le Penseurin intellectual history, Rodin transcended preceding imagery to create a true masterpiece that continues to transfix contemporary society.

Rodin first conceived of the model in 1880-81 to crown the tympanum of his monumental Gates of Hell (fig. 1). The figure was intended to represent Dante, surrounded by the characters of his Divine Comedy, but soon took on an independent life. "Thin and ascetic in his straight gown," Rodin wrote later, "my Dante would have been meaningless once divorced from the overall work. Guided by my initial inspiration, I conceived another "thinker", a nude, crouching
on a rock, his feet tense. Fists tucked under his chin, he muses. Fertile thoughts grow slowly in his mind. He is no longer a dreamer. He is a creator" (quoted in R. Masson & V. Mattiussi, Rodin, Paris, 2004, p. 38).

This superb cast of the subject from 1906 boasts an impeccable provenance including American collectors Ralph Pulitzer and William S. Paley. The works' status as an humanist icon gave it an understandable appeal to these pioneers of American journalism. Transcending Dante's narrative, the Penseur became a universal symbol of reflection and creative genius which has retained its hold on the popular imagination.

Rodin conceived Le Penseur to be the apex, both structurally and philosophically, of his Gates of Hell. As Camille Mauclair noted in 1898, "All the sculptural radiance ends in this ideal center. This prophetic statue can carry in itselfthe attributes of the author of the Divine Comedy, but it is still more completely the representation of Penseur. Freed of clothing that would have made it a slave to a fixed time, it is nothing more than the image of the reflection of man on things human. It is the perpetual dreamer who perceives the future in the facts of the past, without abstracting himself from the noisy life around him and in which he participates..." (Camille Mauclair, "L'Art de M. Rodin", La Revue des Revues, June 18, 1898).

From at least 1888, when the sculpture was first exhibited in Copenhagen, Rodin considered Le Penseur to be an autonomous composition. The following year it was shown in Paris, with the original title Dante revised to read Le penseur: le poète. The work's effect on critics and viewers was immediate and potent, allowing it to transcend the larger scheme of La Porte de l'Enfer. Artists such as Edward Steichen and Edvard Munch worked through a hypnotic attachment to the model (fig. 5). Writer and critic Gabriel Mourey wrote of the work in 1906, “he is no longer the poet suspended over the pit of sin and expiation; he is our brother in suffering, curiosity, contemplation, joy, the bitter joy of searching and knowing. He is no longer a superhuman, a predestined human being; he is simply a man for all ages, for all latitudes” (“Le Penseur de Rodin offert par souscription publique au people de Paris,” Les Arts de la vie, vol. 1, no. 5 (May, 1904), p. 268).

The form of Le Penseur relies upon a historical lineage traceable to Albrecht Dürer’s influential etching, Melancolia (fig. 2). Contained within this figural gesture – tilted head resting upon raised hand – were implications of introversion, philosophical crisis and intellectual profundity. Michelangelo relied upon a similar form for his personification of Lorenzo de Medici (fig. 3) and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux would give the gesture a dark turn in his masterwork of 1865-
67 (fig. 4). The allegorical force of this gesture was undeniable by the time Rodin conceived Le Penseur in 1880.Rodin strips away the narrative and specificity that permeated these earlier examples, rendering his sculpture with a clear humanist vision.

The figure was discussed by the artist shortly before his death, when he described his desire to personify the act of thinking: "Nature gives me my model, life and thought; the nostrils breathe, the heart beats, the lungs inhale, the being thinks and feels, has pains and joys, ambitions, passions, emotions... What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes" (quoted in Saturday Night, Toronto, December 1, 1917).

This cast was commissioned in 1906 by Ralph Pulitzer, the son of publishing magnate Joseph Pulitzer. The Pulitzer family was introduced to Auguste Rodin by author and journalist Stephen MacKenna in 1905. MacKenna served as a Parisian correspondent for New York World between 1903 and 1907 – a newspaper owned by Joseph Pulitzer. MacKenna had written a review of Rodin in 1901 and subsequently acted as an intermediary between the artist and the Pulitzer family. Rodin would later refer to the family as the Kings of America, deservedly so as the Pulitzers were among the most important and influential figures in New York at the turn of the last century. Joseph Pulitzer’s rise from a Hungarian immigrant to a pillar of the publishing industry and wealthy collector personified the American dream. Joseph Pulitzer likewise commissioned a further cast of Le Penseur for his own collection in 1907. This subsequent cast, however, did not bear the distinctive plaque as we find on the present work which evidences Rodin’s personal supervision of the casting process.

The Alexis Rudier Foundry, known for having created some of the most desirable casts of Rodin's oeuvre, executed approximately 30 casts of Le Penseur in this scale beginning in 1902. Other casts from this edition hold positions in prominent museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washintgon, D.C.; The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University; the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia; The Montreal Museum of Art and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917), Le Baiser, 3ème réduction. Photo: Sotheby's.

Inscribed Rodin and with the foundry mark F. Barbedienne, Fondeur. Bronze. Height: 15 5/8 in. 39.8 cm. Conceived in 1886, the reduced version conceived in 1901 and this cast executed on April 7, 1909. Estimation: 800,000 - 1,200,000 USD

This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Critique de l'oeuvre sculpté d'Auguste Rodin currently being prepared by Galerie Brame & Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number2007VI254B.

PROVENANCE:Private Collection, France (acquired circa 1970 and sold: Christie's, New York, May 9, 2000, lot 138)
Private Collection, United States (acquired at the above sale)
Sale: Sotheby's, Paris, December 13, 2007, lot 57
Acquired at the above sale

LITTERATURE: Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, London, 1917, illustration of another cast pl. 6
Georges Grappe, Catalogue du Musée Rodin, Paris, 1927, nos. 91-92, p. 47, illustration of the marble version no. 91
Georges Grappe, Catalogue du Musée Rodin, Paris, 1944, no. 71, illustration of the marble version
Georges Grappe, Le Musée Rodin, Paris, 1947, illustration of the marble version, pl. 71
Cécile Goldscheider, Rodin, sa vie, son oeuvre, son héritage, Paris, 1962, illustration of the marble version, p. 49
Albert Edward Elsen, Rodin (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1963, illustration of the larger bronze version p. 63
Bernard Champigneulle, Rodin, London, 1967, nos. 78-79, illustrations of the marble version pp. 162-163
Robert Descharnes & Jean-François Chabrun, Auguste Rodin, Lausanne, 1967, illustration of the larger marble version p. 131
Ionel Jianou & Cécile Goldscheider, Rodin, Paris, 1967, illustration of the marble version pls. 54-55
Ludwig Goldscheider, Rodin Sculptures, London, 1970, no. 49, illustration of the marble version, p. 121
John L. Tancock, The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin, Philadelphia, 1976, illustration of the marble version p. 77
Jacques de Caso & Patricia B. Sanders, Rodin's Sculpture (exhibition catalogue), The Fine Arts Museum of San
Francisco, San Francisco, 1977, illustrations of another cast pp. 148 & 150
Albert Edward Elsen, In Rodin's Studio, A Photographic Record of Sculpture in the Making, Ithaca, 1980, illustration of the marble on the cover
Hélène Pinet, Rodin, sculpteur et les photographes de son temps, Paris, 1985, no. 34, illustration of the marble p. 46
Nicole Barbier, Marbres de Rodin: Collection du Musée Rodin, Paris, 1987, no. 79, illustration of the marble version p. 185
Frederic V. Grunfeld, Rodin, A Biography, New York, 1987, pp. 187-190, 221-222, 260, 262, 275-276, 281-282, 342, 373-374, 400, 457 and 577
Pierre Kjellberg, Les bronzes du XIXe siècle, Paris, 1987, illustration of another cast p. 585
David Finn & Marie Busco, Rodin and his Contemporaries: The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Collection, New York, 1991, illustrations of another cast pp. 60-61
Albert Edward Elsen, Rodin's Art, The Rodin Collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University, New York, 2003, no. 49, illustration of another cast pp. 214-215
Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, The Bronzes of Rodin, Catalogue of Works in the Musée Rodin, vol. I, Paris, 2007, illustration of another cast p. 161

NOTE: Le Baiser is one of Rodin's best-known and most highly regarded sculptures. Originally intended for the left side of The Gates of Hell, the present work portrays another scene from Dante's Inferno. These are the ill-fated lovers, Paolo and Francesca, who were murdered by Francesca's husband and Paolo's brother, Vanni Malatesta. Banished for their adulterous passion, the two lovers were doomed to spend eternity in an embrace. Among all the love stories inDante's La Commedia, this forbidden liaison, so reminiscent of courtly love, had the greatest resonance for a late 19th-century audience and appeared in seminal works by artists such as Gustave Doré (fig. 1). Unlike more austere, contemporaneous variations of this subject, Le Baiser depicts the lovers in the throws of a passionate kiss. The sensuality of this work, enhanced by the tenderness of the figures' kiss, has made Le Baiser one of the most celebrated images in Western art. Albert Elsen describes the novel gesture of Rodin's Le Baiser: "In The Kiss, which could have been made by 1881, Rodin was still trying to show the official art world that he could compose with the best of the Prix de Rome winners. In fact, he not only outdid them in the sincerity of the lovers'expressions of mutual awareness and love, he even revived an old gesture of sexual appropriation by having the more assertive Francesca sling her leg over that of the hesitant Paolo" (Albert E. Elsen, The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin, Stanford, 1985, p. 78).

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of this work in 1903, "The spell of the great group of the girl and the man that is named 'The Kiss' lies in this understanding distribution of life. In this group waves flow through the bodies, a shuddering ripple, a thrill of strength, and a presaging of beauty. This is the reason why one beholds everywhere on these bodies the ecstasy of this kiss. It is like a sun that rises and floods all with its light" (R. M. Rilke, Rodin, London, 1946, p. 26).

Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917), Ugolin et ses enfants. Photo: Sotheby's.

Inscribed Rodin and with the foundry mark E. Gonon Fondeur. Bronze. Length: 22 in. 56 cm. Conceived in 1882 and cast in 1883. This is the first of only three lifetime casts. Estimation: 800,000 - 1,200,000 USD

This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Critique de l'oeuvre sculpté d'Auguste Rodin currently being prepared by Galerie Brame & Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2003-388B.

PROVENANCE: Henry Lerolle, Paris (acquired from the artist in 1887)
Jacques Lerolle, Paris (by descent from the above)
Guillaume Lerolle (by descent from the above, circa 1925)
Sale: M. Pognon, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, May 10, 1944, lot 34
Lerolle Family (acquired at the above sale)
Sale: Millon & Associés, Hôtel Drouot, March 19, 2004, lot 54
Acquired at the above sale

EXHIBITED: Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, IVe Salon des XX, 1887, no. 689

LITTERATURE: Alain Beausire, Quand Rodin exposait, 1988, Paris, p. 96
Antoinette le Normand-Romain, ed., The Bronzes of Rodin, Catalogue of works in the Musée Rodin, vol. II, Paris, 2007, this cast listed p. 698, illustration of another cast p. 698

NOTE: This early cast of a rare model from Rodin's oeuvre is a towering accomplishment of pathos in sculptural form. Originally intended for the Gates of Hell, the model depicts one of the most memorable characters from Dante's Inferno - Ugolino. The real-life Count Ugolino of Gheradesca was imprisoned for treason during the 13th century war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. He was sentenced to death and locked in a tower with two sons and two grandsons. Dante's personification of this tragic hero is a dark climax of the Inferno, shortly after which the protagonist ascends to Purgatorio. Rodin here depicts the impassioned story of Count Ugolino and his children at its most sympathetic and vivid moment.

The subject has been a significant one for artists and poets since the Gothic age, appearing in works by authors from Chaucer to Percy Shelle and Seamus Heaney. Rodin's take on the subject is indebted to the crowning achievement of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's career as a sculptor. Carpeaux's bronze Ugolin et ses enfants from 1857-62 won a firstclass medal at the 1863 Salon and a cast was thereafter displayed in the Tuileries close to the Laocoön. Rodin's iteration, however, displays a Modernist spirit that contrasts with the heavy Romanticism of Carpeaux's sculpture. Rodin attenuates his figures and creates an expressionist sculpture that conveys the intensity of his subject.

The present cast was commissioned by the artist and patron Henry Lerolle. After studying at the Académie Suisse, Lerolle lived and worked in Paris, submitting works to the Salon by 1868. His works now appear in the collections of Musée d'Orsay, Paris and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Lerolle became a close friend and patron of the artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas, appearing in several portraits by Renoir. Degas took an 1895 photograph of himself with Lerolle's daughters in which appears the present cast of Ugolin et ses enfants. The cast remained in the Lerolle family through much of the 20th century.

In her catalogue of the artist's works, Antoinette le Normand-Romain refers to the superior quality of the Lerolle bronze, cast by Eugene Gonon at his Paris foundry: "Curiously, although it was an earlier cast, it seems more 'accomplished': the hands of Ugolino's children, for example, are more precise, more detailed... The thick lock of hairfalling on Ugolino's forehead should also be noted: it was still present in the plaster S. 460, which corresponds to the fragment from The Gates, but has been eliminated in the other plasters and bronzes" (op. cit., p. 701). The model was instantly prized by connoisseurs of modern sculpture and Rodin was commissioned to create a monumental version of the subject. A cast of this monumental version now holds a coveted position at the Musée Rodin in Paris, appearing in the center of a reflecting pool. Only nine casts were produced of the model in the present scale, three of which were lifetime. The Lerolle cast was the first of these to be produced.

Sotheby's. Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale. New York | 07 mai 2013 - www.sothebys.com