Painting Studio

Like the sculpture studio, that acts as the beating heart of the museum, the painting studio stands as a major witness of the artist’s creation. Bourdelle set up residence at the entrance of number 16 in the Impasse du Maine around 1893. The walls of the studio were contiguous with the cabinet-making shop held by his father on the ground floor of the same building. In the museum’s collection of old photographs, a series of pictures give us an idea of what the painting studio used to look like on a daily basis. There, Bourdelle liked to gather with family members, friends and close students. This place was well suited for face-to-face sessions with visitors and models, whose portraits in oil or pastel Bourdelle sometimes painted.

Bourdelle’s pronounced taste for archaism is especially displayed in his collection of antique sculptures and furniture: a gilded tabernacle in wood from the 18th century, a plaster cast of the monumental David sculpture from Reims cathedral, a wooden polychrome statue of Saint John from the 15th century, or even antique terracotta figurines exhibited in the display cabinet.

Among the bits and pieces of his collection, as well as the furniture found in second-hand shops, Bourdelle displayed his own creations – both sculptures and paintings – to the curious eyes of art lovers. For the visitors of today, as for the guests of old, crossing the threshold to the studio means stepping into the privacy of the artist’s inner world, uncovering the history behind his work and life.

The collection of antiquities

After advising Rodin on the improvement of his collection, Bourdelle started his own one, on a clearly more modest scale, due to his financial means: it fits almost entirely inside this display cabinet. Except for the bearded Cypriot head in limestone from the 5th century BCE, most of the items are in terracotta.

In 1904, Bourdelle bought his first Gallo-Roman figurines, such as Woman Holding a Ram, soon followed by Greek artefacts from the 5th century BCE and Boeotian figurines from the classical era – among them can be spotted the head of a Tanagra, a peplophoros woman, and a large polychrome protome, which may have been painted over by Bourdelle himself. They stand alongside Attic lekythoi – small cylindrical vases with black figures – and artworks of the Hellenistic period from Southern Italy, such as Nymph and Pan, mixed in with a few older Etruscan artefacts, notably a small kore  from the 6th century BCE.

The collection also includes a number of fakes and modern imitations such as Aphrodite with Shell… But Bourdelle did not worry about the authenticity of these antiques, as he chiefly found in them the stuff of dreams.

The collection of great masters

An enthusiastic collector, Antoine Bourdelle gathered many paintings, which were at the time attributed to masters. He bought Venus at her Toilette, which was supposed to be a “great and sublime work by Titian.” Actually, this is an ancient copy of the Venus with a Mirror preserved today at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Above the sloping desk, you may notice a magnificent Portrait of a Woman, in front of a landscape. The dark-haired female figure is richly dressed with a pearl grey satin dress, adorned with black lace and crimson bows. When he acquired it, Bourdelle thought it was a painting from the renowned Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a fellow countryman from Montauban. He believed he could see the master’s technique in the gorgeous shape of the shoulder and the neck. The painting is nowadays attributed to one of Ingres’s disciples, possibly to his student Amaury-Duval.

La collection moderne

Dans la continuité de son activité de professeur, Bourdelle s’intéresse à de jeunes artistes contemporains, qui lui semblent talentueux et prometteurs. Il leur prodigue des conseils et les fait bénéficier de son entregent. 

Au Salon des Tuileries de 1927, il découvre ainsi deux peintres qu’il décide de prendre sous sa protection, le suisse Marcel Poncet et le yougoslave Milo Milunović. Ce dernier devient par la suite un artiste majeur de Serbie, fondateur de l'Académie des Beaux-Arts de Belgrade en 1937. Bourdelle acquiert la Nature morte d’inspiration cubiste admirée au Salon de 1927, et l’accroche au mur de l’un de ses ateliers.

Bourdelle favorisait aussi la présentation de jeunes artistes dans les galeries parisiennes. En 1920, il obtient ainsi que le peintre Louis-Mathieu Verdilhan expose à la prestigieuse galerie parisienne La Licorne, et il rédige une préface élogieuse pour le catalogue.

Bourdelle, the painter and pastellist

He painted several self-portraits, two of which are exhibited here: one, left unfinished, when he was 17, and the other one, with him wearing a straw hat, when he was 47. The latter is heavily influenced by Paul Cézanne and was maybe painted during a summer spent in Villard-de-Lans (Isère). Several small painted sketches portray Marie Laprade, Bourdelle’s first great love, most notably the charming Portrait with Parasol from 1892.

Bourdelle was also a remarkable pastellist. He is said to have produced 300 pastels, essentially female portraits, with vapory effects, exhibited at the Salon during the 1890s. These commissions were a precious source of income for the young artist. They financed his sculptures, while he was waiting for success.

Bourdelle and the Cathedral of Reims

The colossal cast of David, with Raised Arms Holding the Sword, is an outstanding witness of the famous cathedral of Reims, since the original stone statue, from which the cast was made, has been destroyed. In 1906, seeing that some stone figures on the cathedral’s western façade were damaged, the Historical Monuments Department decided to replace them with copies. Probably to use them as references for the new sculptures, impressions of the original artworks on the façade were taken  before their destruction, which was criticised by many artists, notably Rodin.

The casts were retrieved by an antique dealer. This was how Bourdelle acquired two plaster copies of David, taken from the sculpted decor surmounting the great rose window of the cathedral. Bought in 1908, the cast shown in the painting studio was placed by Bourdelle himself, who dedicated in 1912 an entire lesson at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière to this work.

This sculpture proves the artist’s attachment to the cathedral Notre-Dame-de-Reims, which he would take his students to visit. He owned other casts from the cathedral, notably heads of statues from the portals. Bourdelle felt deeply distraught when the building was partially destroyed by the German bombing in September 1914. He then produced dozens of watercolour drawings, where angels try to prevent stones and statues from falling.

Stéphanie Van Parys Bourdelle

Several artworks portray the painter Stéphanie Van Parys, Antoine Bourdelle’s first wife and the mother of his son Pierre, born in 1901. Their divorce was made official in 1910.

Bourdelle painted several portraits of his partner, notably as a dreamer sitting in a garden (on the left of the display cabinet), as well as an intimate portrait of her with their son Pierre in a blue room (on the right of the cabinet). Stéphanie posed for several sculptures, notably for The Cloud, Melancholy, or for the face of Penelope, and Bourdelle used to photograph her frequently.

In one of those pictures, his wife is posing nude, from behind, her bust leaning forward and her left leg resting on the bed. He transcribed this posture into a painting and a sculpture, with both artworks being displayed next to the daybed. In the painting, the intimate setting disappeared to become a nude portrait inside a landscape. In the sculpture, the scene took on a mythological aspect: the young woman has become the Greek heroine Atalanta, holding in her arms golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, left by his suitor Hippomenes.

Cléopâtre Sévastos Bourdelle

The life of Cléopâtre Sévastos, Antoine Bourdelle’s second wife and creator of the museum, is hinted at in several artworks here. Above the daybed, a large portrait depicts her as a child, alongside her two sisters. Born from a Greek aristocratic family, Cléopâtre moved to Paris to learn sculpture, after a first initiation in Athens. She joined Bourdelle’s studio in late 1904 and became his muse, inspiring him many artworks, such as Resting Sculptress. She is shown in her studio smock, her hips delineating a sharp curve, her plaited hair tied on top of her head, and the hammer at her feet. She is leaning on a roughhewn stone sculpture, picturing a hunched-up figure, with a bent head.

After becoming the artist’s wife, she gave up sculpting. Their daughter Rhodia was born in 1911.

To allow Bourdelle to fully focus on his work, she took over the management of the workshops, like a real business leader. She took care of paying the workmen, oversaw the mould-making and casting processes, scheduled the models and students, replied to letters, negotiated with the bank… And when needed, she helped with the enlargement of some sculptures.

Bourdelle highlighted this steadfast character in the slightly austere portrait he produced between 1912-1913, placed over the chimney. We can recognize her iconic hairstyle with tightly wrapped plaits.

Rhodia Dufet Bourdelle

On top of an old kneading trough (wooden chest with a round bottom used to keep flour and knead the dough), two plaster busts act as reminders of Rhodia, Bourdelle’s beloved daughter, born in 1911.

Bourdelle produced a graceful and impish bust of his daughter, named Young Love. Its full-length version can be found in the inner garden, where a winged Rhodia, balancing on one leg, appears as a mischievous sprite bursting out from among the bushes.

Later, the sculptress Marguerite Cossaceanu would portray Rhodia as a smiling and introverted young woman with a sculpted head exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries in 1936. Bourdelle’s Romanian student from the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Cossaceanu also worked as a practitioner, tasked with carving the artworks of the master in his studio. Wife of the medal-maker André Lavrillier, she pursued a career in Paris and Bucharest. She was a renowned portraitist and made the busts of Alberto Giacometti and Georges Enesco. Long after the sculptor’s death, she kept on visiting Cléopâtre and Rhodia Bourdelle.