The impasse du Maine

Vaugirard, a former town that became part of Paris in 1860, was in the late 19th  century a suburban neighbourhood where gardens, houses and dirt roads had still not been erased by urbanisation: a godsend for many sculptors looking for open spaces and one-storey accommodation. Actual artists’ residences started popping up there, such as in the Impasse du Maine (which became Rue Antoine-Bourdelle in 1930), where sculptors worked on the ground floor, while painters set up their studios above.

The Impasse was nothing more than a narrow passageway bordered by small grey buildings, stalls and warehouses – a muddy road with disjointed pavement, filling with puddles at the slightest drop of rain. According to a critic, “clients of high-society painters would never dare to go down there.”

Its tranquility was in stark contrast with the hustle and bustle of the train station or the excitement of the boulevards: birds sang, children played in the middle of the street, chickens pecked between the cobblestones… It felt like “some provincial small town, rather than a short walk away from the Rue de Rennes”. Antoine Bourdelle expressed his delight when he wrote to an acquaintance in Montauban: “A huge garden, of approximately six by seven metres… containing all types of trees, rose bushes, carnations, and what have you.” He used to wake up to “the delightfully deafening squawking of sparrows filling the house”. One critic also got bewitched by the “fragrant blossoming of lilacs and apple trees”. The atmosphere was conducive to work and meditation.

In January 1885, Bourdelle settled in the back of the Impasse, at number 16, one of the new studios rented by the carpenter Pierre Auguste Paillard. He trained for a time with Jules Dalou, his neighbour from number 18. Across the street, at number 11, lived the sculptors Jean Turcan (a practitioner for Auguste Rodin who transposed in marble The Kiss), Georges Récipon (creator of the Quadrigas taking flight from the Grand Palais) and Augustin Antonini (Bourdelle’s founder). At number 9, José de Charmoy created the Monument to Baudelaire, inaugurated at the Montparnasse cemetery during the autumn of 1902.

The house at number 16 teemed with artists. Although the painter Eugène Carrière only made a short visit (1886–1887), the sculptor Jules Cambos (author of The Adulterous Woman) stayed there for a long time (1886–1914). Some neighbours became friends, such as the painters René Prinet and Orville Root. Some of Bourdelle’s students or practitioners lived inside the house, like Gaston Toussaint.

Over time, and with his growing success, Bourdelle started taking over all the studios at number 16, and then others in the Impasse since his monumental and prolific production required a lot of workspace and storage space. Nevertheless, according to Sándor Kémeri in 1928, nothing had disturbed the quiet of this place: “In the peaceful serenity of the impasse, resounds the symphony of a summer morning.”

Valérie Montalbetti