Claudel’s Sketches from Life

A hand rises to a speaker’s mouth, and three women lean in. In another sculpture, a woman kneels at a fireplace and reaches for the mantel with both hands. Camille Claudel called works like these croquis d’après nature, or sketches from life. She took familiar actions as subjects for sculpture and built each scene around the few things it needed. A bench gives a listener somewhere to brace herself. A mantel gives the kneeling woman’s reach a height and direction. The setting can be as small as a corner, yet it determines how the figures move and how much of the action we can see. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

Ideas sent to Paul

An illustrated letter to Claudel’s brother Paul, conventionally dated December 1893, gives an early view of the project. She describes ideas for sculptures and draws some of them alongside the words. One is the group that became The Gossips (Les Causeuses), with three people listening to a fourth behind a screen. The Maison de Camille et de Paul Claudel presents a reproduction of the letter. In it Claudel tells Paul how far she feels she has moved from Rodin’s work. Her excitement makes sense alongside the specificity of her proposals. She was already choosing how many people a scene required and what physical arrangement would give their actions meaning. ^{[2] [4] [5]}

In Le Bénédicité (Grace Before the Meal), she imagines tiny people gathered round a large table listening to the prayer before they eat. The disproportion is there in her description. A broad table would give the figures a common centre and keep their bodies apart even as their attention comes together. In Le Dimanche (Sunday), three men in matching new smocks ride high on a cart on their way to Mass. Here it is the height of the cart and the likeness between the riders that would make them a group. Each idea starts with a familiar activity and proposes a different arrangement of bodies around a large object. ^[5]

The bench in La Faute (The Fault) has another use. A young girl crouches on it, crying, as her startled parents look at her. The bench gives the girl a place to draw in on herself while the parents’ looks make her the centre of the scene. Claudel’s brief description leaves the cause of the tears open. A spectator could read the gap between the girl’s absorption and the parents’ surprise from the disposition of the figures. These three subjects are documented here as proposals on paper. Their interest lies in what Claudel was already testing in the letter, including the visual possibilities of a congregation, a shared journey and an awkward family encounter. ^{[4] [5]}

What memory kept

The Musée Camille Claudel describes her as working from memory and without a posed model in these scenes. Mathias Morhardt offered a possible instance in his 1898 profile in the Mercure de France. He traced The Gossips to four women facing one another in a railway compartment, apparently sharing a secret. The scene could have supplied the opposing seats and the way the group leaned inwards. In the onyx-and-bronze sculpture at the Musée Rodin, the figures are nude, the benches are plain and the screen has become a corner of its own. There is enough enclosure to suggest a private exchange and enough space around the group to see how every figure takes part. ^{[2] [6] [7]}

Morhardt also attributes to Claudel an analogy about a spinning wheel. A wheel at rest presents a circle with evenly spaced spokes. Set it spinning and the spokes disappear from view. The same problem confronts a sculptor who wants to make a body seem to be in motion. A limb under strain looks different from one at ease, and the impression of an action can depend on which part of it the sculptor chooses to fix. In The Gossips the speaker’s lifted hand promises words, while the listeners are already adjusting to catch them. Claudel holds the group at the point where the action has reached their backs, shoulders and necks but the words are still to come. Morhardt reads those differences closely, describing how the women shift their weight and support themselves in distinct ways even as their attention draws them in the same direction. ^{[2] [7]}

Morhardt describes another route from seeing to making in his account of Le Peintre (The Painter). According to him, Claudel made drawings while a painter worked at landscapes on Guernsey, then made a small bronze of a figure standing with a brush and palette. He singles out the moment when the painter mixes his colours before touching the canvas. His account suggests that Claudel could take notes on paper when the opportunity presented itself. It also puts the emphasis on an interval within the work. The weight on the legs and the attention given to the palette make sense because the brush is going to be used. The painter’s pose carries a little of what comes next, just as a listener’s lean carries the expectation of speech. ^[7]

From the studio to the Salon

In a letter to the critic Gustave Geffroy, probably from April 1895, Claudel calls the sketches from life a direction she is still feeling her way into and tells him how much it interests her. She says she has others of the same kind and invites him to see them. The phrase also appeared in the catalogues of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. At the 1895 Salon, the plaster group now known as The Gossips was shown under the title Croquis d’après nature. In 1897 the words described a plaster group with its own title, La Vague. In 1898 they described a bronze statuette, La Profonde Pensée. The catalogues show the term in use over several seasons, for a gathering, a group in motion and a solitary figure. ^{[2] [5] [8]}

The 1897 Salon gives a sense of what the word “sketch” could accommodate. Claudel showed the plaster of The Wave (La Vague) and an onyx-and-bronze version of The Gossips that year. Plaster was a material in which a sculpture could make a public appearance. Bronze and coloured stone gave the artist ways to revisit the same grouping with different surfaces and edges. Getty’s exhibition guide brings the conversation, the bathers and the woman at her hearth together under “Sketches from Life”. That grouping follows a line of work across subjects and materials, while the early Salon records document how particular sculptures were presented at the time. ^{[1] [2] [5] [8]}

In his 1895 Salon review, Geffroy describes the women gathered to hear a story in the shadow of a corner. He places Claudel among artists whose observation, in his view, went deeper than exact imitation. The corner he notices makes that distinction visible. Two upright surfaces are enough to establish shelter and shade. They allow the women’s concentration to suggest a place where voices can drop and a person standing outside the group might have to step closer to hear. ^[9]

A screen, a wave and a hearth

At the Musée Rodin, the screen in The Gossips and the crest in The Wave both mark the limits of a scene. Their relation to the figures is different. The screen shelters a conversation already under way, giving the women a shared interior. The wave is the event itself. Its overhang puts the bathers in the same predicament and leaves a band of open space above their heads. Where the women in The Gossips each answer the speaker with a different lean, the bathers repeat a single bent-knee pose. Repetition lets the eye carry that motion along the line. The change in method makes sense for figures reacting at the same instant to the same thing. ^{[2] [8]}

In Deep Thought (Profonde pensée), the fireplace sets the terms of a solitary action. The woman kneels squarely before it, reaching up to the shelf while bowing her head. The surface she touches gives the pose its spread and the opening gives it a centre. In Dream by the Fireside (Rêve au coin du feu), the woman sits to one side and leans towards the fire. The chair carries her weight, allowing a different kind of forward bend. These are two ways of placing a body in relation to a familiar object. One pose extends to the edges of the surround. The other leaves the woman’s profile and the hearth separately legible. ^{[3] [10]}

Each fireplace gives an impression of a room with very little architecture. The hearth establishes a front, a floor and a place where the eye can follow the woman’s attention. Looking at Deep Thought from behind gives the strongest view of the woman’s extended arms and the fold of her dress, while withholding her face. In Dream by the Fireside, the side view lets us see both where she looks and how she sits. The movement of the viewer around the sculpture can disclose the action in stages. A fireplace that looks like a solid block from the side opens into the space the woman faces as we come around it. ^{[3] [10]}

How materials direct the eye

In the mixed-material examples, colour helps distinguish the figure from what surrounds it. The Rodin Wave sets dark bronze bathers against the greens of onyx marble. Where the bathers overlap the onyx, the bronze outlines stay legible against its veining. In the Musée Camille Claudel’s bronze-and-marble Deep Thought, the dark arms stand out against the pale mantel at the point where the figure touches it. In Denver’s Dream by the Fireside, a coloured marble fireplace and bronze figure are joined by another source of contrast. The museum records a functioning electric light in its example, making the glow an actual feature of the object. Across the groups, stone can enclose a figure, loom over it or give the direction of its gaze a visible destination. ^{[3] [8] [11]}

Small scale lets a viewer take in a setting and a gesture together. The figure in Deep Thought can be followed in one glance from knees to mantel. With The Wave, the whole overhang can stay in view while the eye moves from one pair of bent knees to the next. In The Gossips, the most revealing point may be the gap between the mouth about to speak and the nearest head. The drawings sent to Paul show Claudel thinking about that kind of relationship at the design stage. A prayer sets a group around a table, a cart raises three matching figures above the ground, and a secret draws people across the space between two benches. Each subject gives the sculpture a way to organise attention. ^{[2] [3] [4] [5] [8]}