This is one of Rodin’s many heads of Balzac, the acclaimed French writer of the early Nineteenth Century. It was modeled in preparation for The Monument to Honoré de Balzac, a commission Rodin received in 1891 and completed in 1898. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a critically acclaimed and very popular French novelist and playwright. Best known for his stories and novels titled La Comédie humaine, his work presented a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. In working on his Balzac, Rodin sought to know and understand not only the writer’s creative genius, but also how he looked. Balzac had died forty years before and although a few very early photographs of him existed along with some written descriptions, and some portrait drawings and paintings, Rodin wanted a better understanding of Balzac’s physical appearance. So he went to Balzac’s hometown and found someone...
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