“What astonishes me in you,” said I, “is that you work quite differently from your confrères. I know many of them and have seen them at work. They make the model mount upon a pedestal called the throne, and they tell him to take such or such a pose. Generally they bend or stretch his arms and legs to suit them, they bow his head or straighten his body exactly as though he were a lay figure. Then they set to work. You, on the contrary, wait till your models take an interesting attitude, and then you reproduce it. So much so that it is you who seem to be at their orders rather than they at yours.”
Rodin, who was engaged in wrapping his figurines in damp cloths, answered quietly:
“I am not at their orders, but at those of Nature! My confrères doubtless have their reasons for working as you have said. But in thus doing violence to nature and treating human beings like puppets, they run the risk of producing lifeless and artificial work.
“As for me, seeker after truth and student of life as I am, I shall take care not to follow their example. I take from life the movements I observe, but it is not I who impose them.
“Even when a subject which I am working on compels me to ask a model for a certain fixed pose, I indicate it to him, but I carefully avoid touching him to place him in the position, for I will reproduce only what reality spontaneously offers me.
“I obey Nature in everything, and I never pretend to command her. My only ambition is to be servilely faithful to her.”
“Nevertheless,” I answered with some malice, “it is not nature exactly as it is that you evoke in your work.”
Study
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
