Description
Executed in 1899, exhibited on May 26, 1900, and then sent from Rome on June 6, 1900, The Suppliant (plaster) was exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1901. It is a work in which the influence of Camille Claudel and Rodin is evident; its dimensions and title recall some of the damned women on the tympanum of The Gates of Hell. As Luce Rivet indicates in her remarks on Segoffin’s art, “the modeling, a compromise between the lessons of Barrias and Falguière and the art of Rodin, asserts a surface pulsation that is the antithesis of ‘academic’ coldness” (op. cit., p. 280). It is precisely this same fervor, with its Rodinesque overtones, that one can admire in our statuette. In the prints, the bronzes often bear, as here, in addition to the signature, a stamped mark, formed among other things by the sculptor’s initials.
