The Burghers of Calais

What happened at Calais in 1347

The event belongs to the Hundred Years' War between France and England. The Musée Rodin sets it out plainly: six citizens sacrificed themselves when they gave the keys of their city to the King of England in 1347, ending a siege that had lasted a year.

The Cleveland Museum of Art calls the siege brutal and gives its length as eleven months, and describes the six as men who volunteered to be taken prisoner in exchange for the release of the town. The Art Institute of Chicago names the king as Edward III and says the siege had been starving the inhabitants for nearly a year.

The Musée Rodin names the six: Eustache de Saint-Pierre, Jean d'Aire, Pierre and Jacques de Wissant, Andrieu d'Andres and Jean de Fiennes.

The commission, and a date worth checking

Omer Dewavrin, the mayor of Calais, approached Rodin through the sculptor Alphonse Prosper Isaac, and an official commission followed the next year. The Musée Rodin tells that sequence on its own page for the Meudon plaster, but prints the approach as 1894 — a year that cannot stand beside the completion date of 1889 on the same page.

The Cleveland Museum of Art gives the year that fits: in 1884 Rodin received a commission to create a large public monument honouring the six. The same museum dates the monument 1884–89. The approach therefore belongs to 1884 and the formal commission to 1885.

Rodin completed the final version in 1889, according to the Musée Rodin. After casting, it was unveiled in Calais on 3 June 1895, six years later.

Which cast is described here

The bronze pictured above belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession 1989.407. The museum dates the modelling 1884–95 and the cast to 1985, made by the Coubertin foundry at Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse. Iris and B. Gerald Cantor gave it to the museum in 1989. It measures 209.6 by 238.8 by 241.3 centimetres.

That cast is posthumous by sixty-eight years. Auguste Rodin died in 1917, so no hand of his touched the metal. What he left behind were the models and molds, and the right to cast from them.

The Musée Rodin holds the plaster the bronzes descend from, inventory S.153, in the plaster gallery at its Meudon site. The museum records it as 225 by 240 by 200 centimetres and dates its completion to 1889.

Lifetime casts and posthumous casts

The date of the model is not the date of the cast, and for Rodin the two can be a century apart. A label reading 'modelled 1884–95, cast 1985' describes one object accurately rather than contradicting itself.

The Musée Rodin publishes the rule that governs the later bronzes. As Rodin's beneficiary it holds his intellectual property rights, and it oversees casting from the original models and molds in his bequest. The number of bronzes that may be cast from an original work is limited to twelve, and the museum traditionally acquires one of them for the French national collections.

Each project, the museum states, requires detailed historical and archival research and must be validated by two committees of sculpture experts, French and foreign. An ethical charter sets the criteria. That machinery is why an authorised 1985 bronze is a different category of object from an unauthorised aftercast.

Reading the Metropolitan Museum of Art plate

The photograph is a studio plate taken from slightly above eye level, a little to the left of centre. It shows the group from one side only. Five of the six heads are legible in the frame; the sixth is hidden behind the others, and nothing below the far side of the group can be seen.

At the left of the plate a man bows his head until the face is nearly horizontal, and raises his right hand open with the fingers spread. A thick braided rope loops around his neck and falls across the shoulder. His other arm hangs, and a second bare arm and hand belonging to a figure behind him drop into the same passage.

In the middle a bearded man faces forward. Beside him a bald head is bowed so low that only the crown and a sliver of cheek show, and a forearm sweeps horizontally in front of it. At the right a man stands upright in profile with his jaw set, a heavy rope around his neck running down his back in two strands.

Behind that upright figure, two hands press against a bowed head, the fingers of one lying across the other. His face is completely hidden behind them at this angle. The plate shows the gesture and withholds the expression.

Low in the frame, two large hands hang clear of the robes. One is closed into a fist with the knuckles forward. The other curls loosely around a shaft, and beside it a ring-shaped bow and a flat bit read as a large key — the keys of the city the six were carrying out.

The modelling and the patina

The drapery is the main surface event. The robes fall in long unbroken ridges that catch the light as hard white lines, with deep near-black troughs between them. Rodin used the cloth to carry the weight of the figures downward while the heads and hands do the acting.

The patina on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's cast reads dark brown to black, not green. The high points of the drapery are polished to a silvery sheen. Warm reddish-brown shows along the top of the base where the light falls flat, and the deepest recesses at the lower centre of the group go a greenish black.

Hands and faces are modelled at a different pitch from the cloth. Knuckles, tendons, the cords of a neck and the texture of a beard are worked in small separate touches, so those passages break the light into many pieces while the robes break it into few.

The sculpture, the base and the pedestal

Three things stack in the photograph and only one of them is the sculpture. The figures stand on a bronze plinth cast with them, whose top surface ripples slightly and over whose edge the hems of the robes spill. That plinth is part of the work.

Under it sits a plain pale museum pedestal with a visible joint line. That is museum furniture, chosen by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it is not Rodin's. Behind everything is a graduated grey studio backdrop, which is lighting equipment rather than a wall in a gallery.

The distinction matters for this sculpture more than for most. How high the burghers stand above a viewer changes what the group does, and the height in the photograph is the museum's decision about display, not a fact about the monument.

The figures that left the group

Rodin made the six as separate studies before assembling them, and the separate versions kept circulating afterwards. The Musée Rodin holds numerous models and studies of nude figures, hands and drapery at Meudon.

The Cleveland Museum of Art records that Rodin exhibited a life-size Pierre de Wissant as an independent work before he completed the monument, and that he later made multiple versions in various sizes and media. Of Jean d'Aire the same museum writes that the figure was immensely popular on its own and that Rodin made numerous versions at various scales.

One of those travelled early. The Art Institute of Chicago holds a plaster Jean d'Aire, painted to look like bronze, that was shown at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and entered the collection that year. The monument itself would not be unveiled in Calais for another two years.

What Rodin refused to make

Public monuments of the period tended to elevate a single figure and idealise him. The Cleveland Museum of Art states what Rodin did instead: rather than idealised heroes, he portrayed the prominent citizens as ordinary men experiencing personal confrontations with death.

The same museum reads the individual figures that way. Jean d'Aire faces his fate with stoic resolve, and the thick folds of his tunic weigh on his body. Pierre de Wissant's expression suggests extreme mental suffering as he contemplates his expected execution.

Fear and resolve sit side by side in the same group, at the same scale, with no one raised above the others. A monument built to honour six men shows some of them close to breaking.

The studio behind the commission

The years of the monument overlap the decade Camille Claudel spent in Rodin's studio. The Musée Rodin dates that period from 1882, when they met, to their parting in 1892, and lists her roles in one line: student, assistant, mistress and muse.

Claudel worked in the studio on Rodin's commissions during exactly the years the Burghers were modelled and cast. The museum's phrasing describes the arrangement without assigning her particular passages of particular works, and no attribution of specific hands or heads within the group follows from it.

She was one of several. A commission on this scale ran on assistants, enlargers, mould-makers and a foundry, and the finished bronze is the product of a workshop with Rodin's name on it.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

A Metropolitan Museum of Art studio plate of the museum's 1985 cast, 1989.407, taken from slightly above eye level and a little left of centre. Five of the six heads are legible in the frame. The sixth is hidden behind the others, and the whole far side of the group is out of view.