Camille Claudel
The sculptor in Rodin’s shadow.
Camille Claudel was Rodin’s pupil and lover and a brilliant sculptor in her own right. She was confined to psychiatric hospitals for the last thirty years of her life.
Camille Claudel was born in 1864 in Fère-en-Tardenois in northern France. Even as a child she modelled figures in clay. Her younger brother was the writer and diplomat Paul Claudel. In 1881 the family moved to Paris, where she studied at the Académie Colarossi and received guidance from the sculptor Alfred Boucher.
In 1883 she met Auguste Rodin, who was 24 years her senior. She became his pupil, assistant and lover. She worked on details of his major works, including hands and feet for The Gates of Hell and The Burghers of Calais. The relationship lasted about ten years. Rodin would not leave his companion Rose Beuret, and the affair ended in the early 1890s.
Claudel’s own works are often small and intimate and express emotion through movement. Sakuntala of 1888 shows a pair of lovers reunited. The Waltz shows a dancing couple who seem to whirl round. The Age of Maturity, usually interpreted as an image of her break with Rodin, is in bronze in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. She also worked in onyx and marble, and in The Gossips and The Wave she depicted everyday moments in an entirely new way.
In the first years of the 20th century she lived in growing isolation and poverty. She developed paranoid ideas, particularly about Rodin, and destroyed many of her works. In 1913, shortly after her father’s death, her family had her committed to a psychiatric hospital. She spent the last thirty years of her life in institutions and never sculpted again. Doctors suggested that she could be discharged, but her family opposed it. She died in 1943.
For a long time she was known mainly as Rodin’s lover. Since the 1980s she has been rehabilitated as a significant sculptor in her own right, not least through books and films. Since 2017 a museum devoted to her has existed in Nogent-sur-Seine, where the family lived during her youth.