Embracing Couple or Prodigal Son

about 1880

Medium

Pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash with gray opaque watercolor over black chalk, heightened with white opaque watercolor, on tracing paper

Dimensions

21 × 16.2 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-205903

A figure moves from the right to embrace a slightly taller shadowed form. Rodin first sketched the entwined pair in pen and ink before revising and enhancing the figure on the left with wash and opaque watercolor. His delicate application of ink and watercolor over the pen strokes creates playful effects of contrasting shadow and light which belie the powerful forms and inherent strong emotion of the scene. A kneeling penitent figure is lightly sketched in ink with the sheet turned 180 degrees. The study is one of Rodin’s so-called “black drawings,” named for their dark and tormented subjects. Executed around 1880, these works closely relate to Rodin’s major sculptural commission The Gates of Hell, on which he began work in that year. The black drawings were not directly preparatory for the sculpted figures in this ambitious project, but were similarly inspired by the Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s epic Divine Comedy. Recalling this period of his career, Rodin said, “I lived a whole year with Dante, living only of him and with him and sketching the eight circles of his Hell....”