Tte monumental de Balzac

Rodin received the commission for a monument to Balzac from the Socit des Gens de Lettres in 1891, and immediately began to model studies of the writer's head. The project occupied the artist for seven years, during which time he produced over fifty studies of heads and nude and draped figures. This study, as with many of the heads, as Albert Elsen has noted, "[has] a workmanlike quality, as if the artist were assembling the characteristic features--the great brows, disheveled hair, protruding lips, upturned moustache and fleshy nose" (A. Elsen, Rodin, New York, 1963, p. 93). The work exhibits the vitality that inspired the artist, who commented upon the qualities that he strove to express in the monument: "I think of his intense labor, of the difficulty of his life, of his incessant battles and of his great courage. I would express all that" (ibid).