Man with the Broken Nose, Reduction (L'homme au nez cassé, réduction)

For one of his earliest independent works, Rodin discarded conventional notions of beauty and chose as his model a local handyman whose rough but dignified features, including a broken nose, likely reminded him of the ancient portrait busts he studied at the Louvre. Vividly alive, and thus to him beautiful, it was a face the artist was compelled to model in clay, as Rainer Maria Rilke recounted:

Rodin’s motive in modeling this head, the head of an aging, ugly man, whose broken nose even helped to emphasize the tortured expression of the face, must have been the fullness of life that was cumulated in these features. There were no symmetrical planes in this face at all, nothing repeated itself, no spot remained empty, dumb, or indifferent.

This face had not been touched by life, it had been permeated through and through with it as though an inexorable hand had thrust it into fate and held it there in the whirlpool of a washing, gnawing torrent. A smaller variant of the head would later appear in The Gates of Hell, and Rodin had it cast in a variety of sizes, of which this reduction is one. In 1875 a marble version his assistant carved became the first of Rodin’s works to be accepted at the Paris Salon.