Rodin’s Dream of Egypt

The exhibition features over 400 items, all restored for the occasion, which include Auguste Rodin’s personal collection of Egyptian art, his own sculptures and drawings, as well as archives and photographs to put into context his “friends of the last hour”, as the artist liked to call the antiques he cherished.

It also evokes the echo of Egyptian art in Rodin’s work, through his research on the representation of the human body, the simplification of forms, fragmentation and monumentality. For instance, the Monument to Balzac (1898) of which he said “Balzac is the Sphinx of France”.

The exhibition is presented in sequences that alternate between Rodin’s Egyptian studio and his Egyptian museum, at the Villa des Brillants in Meudon and the Hôtel Biron in Paris. The visit also reveals several narratives of XIXth century visions of Egypt; they conjure the intermediaries, writers, artists, antiquarians and Egyptologists, who guided the artist down an Egyptian path by feeding him various visual references, stories or artifacts. The constitution of Rodin’s collection thus reveals the history of the art market and antiquarians of this period.