Victor Hugo (three-quarter view)

Auguste Rodin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The author of Notre-Dame de Paris(1831) and Les Misérables (1862) 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. Moreover, Hugo's devoted mistress Juliette Drouet was dying of cancer. 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. Rodin made dozens of drawings from every possible viewpoint, some rapidly sketched on the spot and others from memory, before being allowed to set up a modeling stand in an out-of-the-way corner to work in clay. From these preliminaries Rodin created the bust of Hugo that he first exhibited at the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français in 1884. A series of splendidly executed prints followed. The fifth state of this Three-Quarter View was published in the journal L'Artiste in February 1885.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art