However, Zola lost his position as the Société in 1894, and, the organisation's new management began to question whether its former president had been too high-handed in his dealings with the sculptor. In 1892, the Société forwarded him 5,000 francs, and the following year, Zola himself arranged for a second payment to be made, bringing the total received by the artist for this work to 10,000 francs. To overcome these difficulties the artist took to depicting the writer in a baggy, smock or houppelande. “The awkwardly protruding stomach,” Mayo Roos explains, “would be hard to conceal if the figure were dressed in contemporary garb.” The more he looked, the more problems emerged. He studied photographs and portraits of the man, and even travelled to Touraine in central France where Balzac had been born, to examine the body types common in that area.

Nevertheless, Rodin sought to capture the late writer’s likeness. Moreover, Rodin couldn’t simply fashion a bold, muscled likeness of the writer, since “the giant of French literature had been a short tubby man, ungainly in appearance and by his last years physically ravaged from the effects of overwork.”Įdward Steichen, Balzac: the Silhouette: 4AM, 1980. As the art history professor and Phaidon author Jane Mayo Roos explains in our Rodin monograph, “Balzac had been dead for forty years and he and Rodin had never met.” While the commission should have been straightforward, the subject proved problematic. In 1891, the writer Emile Zola became president of the French literary body, Société des Gens des Lettres, and appointed the 50-year-old sculptor to create a monument to the late novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac. Yet not everyone appreciated these merits during his lifetime, as the troubles associated with one monumental sculpture make clear. On the anniversary of the sculptor’s birth we look at the botched commission that became a great workĪuguste Rodin, who was born today, 12 November, in 1840, is known both for his classical brilliance, and for his innovative, impressionistic flair - a latter-day heir to sculptors of antiquity and a worthy contemporary of Monet and Manet. As reproduced in our Rodin monograph Auguste Rodin’s battle with Balzac

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