Christie’s roundel
Lot 151 From the Collection of the Late Walter Pach

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)

Les Amours conduisant le Monde (Roger Marx, Delteil, Thorson 1)

Closed31 March 2010

Price Realised

GBP 2,500

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Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)
Les Amours conduisant le Monde (Roger Marx, Delteil, Thorson 1)
drypoint, 1881, on laid Japon, signed in pencil in the margin upper right, a rich, early impression of the second state, printing with much burr and plate tone, with margins, inscribed in pencil along the lower sheet edge 'Le Printemps by Rodin (signature of the artist at upper right hand corner) For Nikifora, 1955 - Walter Pach No 278', scattered foxing, a vertical crease in the subject at right, other minor creases and some surface dirt mainly in the margins
P. 201 x 251 mm.

Walter Pach (1883-1958), New York. Then by descent to the present owners. (See the note for lot 103.)

Specialist note

Rodin created this drypoint, his first ever print, when visiting the printmaker Alphonse Legros in his London studio. According to W. Shaw Sparrow (Auguste Rodin's Dry-Point Engravings', The Studio, no. 28, March 1903, pp. 88-93), he used a sewing needle to scratch the image onto the back of one of Legros' plates. The first state prints with the mark of the plate maker Hughes & Kimber, which was stamped into the reverse of the plate. In the second state this mark is burnished out, but in richly inked, early impressions such as the present one, it is still visible at the upper right of the globe.