Auguste Rodin Prepares to Show His Famed Portrait of Victor Hugo

Rodin’s activity as a print-maker was mainly concentrated in the mid-1880s, when he made thirteen drypoints. He learned the technique from Alphonse Legros while visiting him in London in 1881.

Roger Marx, the first cataloguer of Rodin’s drypoints, wrote of the sculptor’s immediate grasp of the potential of the drypoint technique, and compared the physical effort of chiseling the image in the plate to carving marble, noting that drypoint lines ‘transparently reveal the artist’s battle’.

Victor Hugo, The author of Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, was an old man when Rodin proposed to make his portrait. Hugo’s patience with sittings had been strained to the breaking point by another sculptor whose efforts are reported to have produced a mediocre bust.  Details of the story vary, but the earliest published accounts agree that Rodin was permitted to be present in the Hugo household and to make sketches, but that the poet would not actually pose.  From these preliminaries Rodin created the bust of Hugo that he first exhibited at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français in 1884.

Autograph note signed, on his calling card, with a signed note to “Monsieur Moline, Galerie Moline Lafitte Street on the right,” mentioning his drypoint of Hugo and his desire to show in the following day.  “Monsieur Moline would you kindly give the dry-point Victor Hugo to the porter. I must show it tomorrow morning.  Greetings. A. Rodin”