This work will be included in the forthcoming Auguste Rodin catalogue critique de l'oeuvre sculpté currently being prepared by the Comité Rodin at Galerie Brame et Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2013-4190B.

With Masque de Sévérine (conceived in 1893) Auguste Rodin captured the features of an extraordinary contemporary woman. The work portrays Caroline Rémy, known by her pseudonym ‘Sévérine’. She was a strong-willed, independent woman, who – against the obstacles of her time – asserted herself as a respected journalist and a committed activist. She divorced her first husband at the age of seventeen and later left her second husband Dr. Guebhard for the political activist Georges de la Bruyère.

Animated by a sincere desire to serve the cause of the poor, Sévérine was a vocal presence in the intellectual debates of the time. The novelist Lucien Descaves praised her, writing: ‘whenever there was a barricade, she was on the right side of it. She liked the poor, justice, and work well done’ (quoted in A. Le Normand-Romain, The Bronzes of Rodin: Catalogue of Works in the Musée Rodin, vol. II, Paris, 2007, p. 649).

In 1893 Rodin, impressed by the spirit and facial features of this young woman, executed a number of drawings and clay sketches of Sévérine. Remembering her relationship with the master, Sévérine would later observe: ‘we shared a beautiful friendship, distant and sure, based on mutual trust in our professional integrity, his esteem, not for my knowledge of the arts, but for my instinct, for my enthusiasm for everything that he loved’ (quoted in Ibid., p. 649).

At the sculptor’s death, Sévérine was among the intellectuals who mourned Rodin’s disappearance as a major loss, predicting: ‘posterity… will speak of Auguste Rodin as people have been speaking of Michelangelo for the last four hundred years’ (quoted in Ibid., p. 650). A cast of Masque de Sévérine was displayed in the important 1917 Rodin exhibition at the Galerie Haussmann, one of the last to be inaugurated while Rodin was still alive.

This work was also executed in an edition of six between 1910 and 1917 titled Mulâtresse. The musée Rodin executed this work in at least three bronzes cast by Alexis Rudier between 1926 and 1927. Two bronzes were cast by Emile Godard between 1982 and 1983. In total, twenty-two Masque de Sévérine have been executed to our knowledge.