Discover other drawings from the Bourdelle Museum

This drawing was for the monument to Marquis Jérôme Ludovic de Solages (1862-1927), which Bourdelle worked on during his final months. Ludovic de Solages, President of the Carmaux Mining Company, had been in correspondence with Bourdelle since 1924 about organising posing sessions to produce a bust, of which the Musée Bourdelle holds two plaster casts (MBPL4136 and MBPL4137). On 18 April 1925, Bourdelle was asked to design a monument to the Marquis in Carmaux. ...

Drawn with a sovereign hand, this pen-and-ink drawing is of Cléopâtre Sévastos, Bourdelle’s young student who accompanied the master on his trip to Marseille in 1906. She later married him, in 1910...

In 1915, British nurse Edith Cavell (1865-1915) was executed in Belgium, by the Germans, for her activities in the Resistance. Her death touched people beyond Belgium’s borders, and led the editorial board of the newspaper Le Matin to commission a monument in her honour to be erected in the Tuileries Gardens...

Antoine Bourdelle visited Étables-sur-Mer, a coastal town in Côtes d’Armor (Brittany), on several occasions. Following these frequent visits, the sculptor made himself available to the municipality, through its mayor, Heurtel-Lamy, to erect a monument commemorating the commitment of the town’s soldiers during the First World War. However, despite the recognition Bourdelle enjoyed at the time, a young, local sculptor, Francis Renaud, had already been chosen for the project...

This drawing is a preparatory sketch for the monument erected in Besançon in honour of the writer Louis Pergaud (1882-1915) – author of De Goupil à Margot and the famous The War of the Buttons – who was killed at the front at the start of the First World War. Charles Léger, Louis Pergaud’s biographer, suggested Bourdelle for the work. Bourdelle conceived his monument as a veritable piece of architecture, as shown by other sketches preserved in the Museum...

On the whiteness of the wove paper, the stark black ink of the youthful drawings delivers an abrupt darkness. And in between, the dark waters of the wash bring out a sepia-brown chiaroscuro of strange images - the outline of a gallows, and a sneering, bodyless head that can be compared to a wash by Victor Hugo, Gavroche at 11 years old (Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo): “When the eye sees black, the heart sees trouble,” wrote the author of Les Misérables...

Between 1881 and 1891, Bourdelle produced around 100 known drawings inspired by Césette. The Story of a Peasant Girl. The Montauban writer Émile Pouvillon (1840-1906) had asked Bourdelle for these illustrations for a new illustrated edition of his novel, published by Alphonse Lemerre in 1881...

For Bourdelle, the monster had virtues as an outlet, perhaps even as prophylaxis. It kept images of death (and no doubt death itself) at bay. Incidentally, the word monstrum means “the prodigy that warns of the will of the gods”. They seem to have an oracular and thaumaturgical virtue, like these Angels of the Apocalypse, which sprang from the young Bourdelle’s pen in 1885–1890...