Daphne Transformed Into a Laurel Tree (Daphné changée en lauriers)

“I am making a Daphne, pursued, imploring, and turned into a laurel tree. Without really meaning it to be, it is your body. But I'm disguising it a little, otherwise it would be too much you” (letter from Bourdelle to Cléopâtre Sévastos, 1910). 
Cléopâtre Sévastos was a young Greek student, who arrived at Bourdelle's studio in Impasse du Maine in 1904. She soon became close to the master. During the years 1905–1915, Bourdelle ceaselessly explored the body of his Muse – in drawings, paintings and in the round – creating variations of its form in order to extol it all the more. Borrowed from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the myth of the nymph transformed into a laurel tree to escape Apollo's pursuit, rediscovers all its instinctual force. The work was conceived at a time when Cléopâtre, pregnant with the sculptor’s baby, had returned to her native Greece – in fact, to Thessalia, the home of Daphne.  
Bourdelle captures the crucial moment when the distraught nymph surrenders to the undulating embrace of metamorphosis: her legs are already taking root, her arms raised to the sky are becoming branches, while the bushy triangle of her pubis offers a hypnotic point of languorous hybridisation. Captured in its “floral ecstasy”, this femininity is part of the botanical, ornamental logic of Art Nouveau, similar to the stylisation of the metallic arabesques of Hector Guimard's entrance arches for the Paris Metro. Deeply rooted in the artist's personal mythology, the figure of Daphne appears in one of the frescoes for the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and in later watercolours such as The Abondoned Apple Tree (1917) and My Garden Project (1919).

Jérôme Godeau