Graphic arts

Antoine Bourdelle drew all his life, from childhood to his final days in 1929. Over and over again he stated that “sculpture, in the end, is nothing other than drawing in every direction.”

The fruits of this daily pictorial habit have been preserved in Bourdelle’s studios in Paris, where he moved in 1885, in what is now the museum.
This collection contains some 6,350 sheets. 1,500 of them were added when the museum was established in 1949, thanks to donations from his widow Cléopâtre and his daughter Rhodia Dufet-Bourdelle. Rhodia Dufet-Bourdelle’s bequest to the City of Paris in 2002 added more than 4,000 drawings to the collection.

Pastels, charcoals, drawings in graphite pencil and ink, watercolours  and gouaches make up a collection of exceptional variety: formative drawings, youthful drawings marked by the stamp of dark romanticism (Wasted Head of one of the Mummies of Saint-Michel, Bordeaux); works of art in their own right (Full-length Portrait of Marie Laprade), or spontaneous sketches (Studies of Cats and Figures), Sketches of nude models; sketches from memory - Nijinski in a Harlequin Costume, Isadora); preparatory drawings for sculptures and monuments (Hannibal’s First Victory, Sevastos Before the Hindu Gods, Greek Archer, etc. So many facets of Bourdelle's talent, so many reflections of a fertile and ever-renewing creative life.