Bourdelle - Sculpture & Drawing

              FOREWORD
For a sculptor, Emile Antoine Bourdelle was probably born at the best of times and, by
coincidence, not in the worst of places.
Montauban, some thirty miles from Toulouse, had been the birth place of Ingres
eighty one years earlier and the aura had not tarnished when Bourdelle was born there
in 1861. The best of times, too, for one destined to be a sculptor for sculpture was
emerging from the neo-classic eclecticism and was ·at last being revitalized.
Montauban, a prosperous little city renowned for its gooseliver trade, its weaving
of silk, rough cloth, and woodworking gave a measure of prosperity to Bovrdelle's father
in his trade as .a carpenter and cabinetmaker. But Bourdelle himself was, none the less,
a country boy with a typically French love of the countryside particularly the region
around the River Tarn. His mother, "of the little nobility of the country," may have
been the source of inspiration that sent him to Paris at the age of twenty-four, or it might
have been the influence of an uncle who, as a stonecutter, lived nearby. At the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts he became a pupil of Falguiere and shortly after of the more serious and
gifted Dalou but it was his association with the great Rodin that set him on a lifelong
course to eminence.
The miseries of 1870 with the fall of the Empire and the proclamation of the Third
Republic had been relieved by the time Bourdelle came to Paris. The artistic climate
was encouraging and by 1889, with the winning of a medal in the Exposition Universelle,
Bourdelle was already known and recognized.
At the turn of the century, with the establishment of the Academie Rodin, Bourdelle
was already an acknowledged teacher. His friendship with Rodin, while still a pupil,
went far beyond the usual pupil to master relationship; there was a mutual admiration.
Rodin did not hesitate to express his enthusiasm . .. "I love his sculpture," he said, "So
personal, so expressive of his sensitive nature, of his fiery and impassioned temperament."
And it was not that Rodin and Bourdelle stood alone as inspired sculptors. Despiau
and Maillol were producing in France in the grand manner of the times. Mestovic in
Yugoslavia and Milles in Sweden were coming into their own. But all, in some measure,
were indebted to Bourdelle and through him to Rodin. The American expatriate, Epstein,
working in London, and the American Paul Manship owed, perhaps, an even greater debt.
The debt owed to Bourdelle of course goes beyond this. In sculpture for architecture
and in monuments for the townplanner his influence was enormous. True that his age