Rodin at 100

The girl who posed for Auguste Rodin’s figure of Eve on the ‘Gates of Hell’ was, the sculptor said, a ‘panther’. She was a young Italian, pregnant, but barely showing. Not a professional artist’s model. He found the girls who modelled for the Academy painters too affected. He liked stretchers, yawners, fidgeters, jitterbug girls who couldn’t sit still.

His figures in plaster, bronze and marble have a pretzel suppleness. They do the splits, lie curled and foetal, fold at the waist, and crouch doubled like Atlas. His sibyls hold yoga poses. His prodigal son has a six-pack. A sketch might take only three, four, five charcoal or gouache strokes. Then: new pose, new page. He sought out dancers: Isadora Duncan, Carmen Damedoz — and Loie Fuller, who swirled her sleeves and skirts until she looked like a peony. He collected photographs of the Javanese dancers who performed at the Great Exhibition in Paris in 1889 and drew the Royal Cambodian dancing troupe on their state visit in 1906.