Masterpiece Story: The Burghers of Calais by Auguste Rodin

A Bit of History

The Burghers of Calais was commissioned to commemorate an event during the Hundred Years’ War. In 1347, Edward III commanded the English forces to seize the strategically important Port of Calais. The port was besieged for eleven months. With the population starving, six burghers—the leading citizens in town—offered their lives in exchange for the ending of the siege. Edward then ordered them to dress in plain robes and walk barefooted like penitents, with nooses around their necks. They were to bring him the keys to the town and then be killed. However, Edward’s wife, Philippa, pleaded for clemency for the sake of her unborn child, so the king changed his mind.

The story, which had been told in Jean Froissart’s fourteenth century Chronicles, was a well-known one in France. It had frequently been represented by both French and British-based artists, including versions by the eighteenth century history painter Benjamin West (below). Most, like West, focused on the climactic meeting between king and burghers, or the intercession of the queen.

Rodin’s Commission

In 1884, the town council of Calais decided to honor Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the leading burgher, with a statue. He was a local hero, but the commission was also a response to the political unrest of the time. National confidence had been shattered by the 1870 Prussian invasion, during which Paris fell despite the brief optimism sustained by a revolutionary Commune there. The nineteenth-century leaders of Calais were keen to remember the heroism of their forefathers and remind contemporary citizens that if France had survived invasion and siege in the past, it could deal with whatever happened in the present.

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was given the task of creating the monument in January 1885. He was, by that time, an established though not uncontroversial sculptor. He had started working on a commission to produce bronze doors for the Museum of Decorative Arts, now known as The Gates of Hell. For this Calais project, Rodin had asserted himself from the start, rejecting the council’s preferred idea of a statue of one man in favor of representing all six of the Medieval burghers.

The model he produced in order to secure the commission, showed the six figures walking out, linked by a rope, with Saint-Pierre in the lead. Rodin then went on to significantly change poses, gestures, and the placement of the figures. The second model he produced for the town council was a group portrayal of six detached individuals, and the plinth had been removed. Upon seeing the latter, the council complained: “This is not the way we envisaged our glorious citizens.”

The Figures

The names of the six burghers were recorded in local chronicles. Eustache de Saint-Pierre was the first man to volunteer, the oldest, and the most important citizen of the group. Although Rodin rejected the idea of showing him alone, Saint-Pierre is still given prominence in a central position, distinguished by a thick beard, which exaggerates the gaunt cheekbones of his starved face. Additionally, Rodin puts emphasis on his age and weakness by rendering him hunched and exhausted.

Jean d’Aire, the second volunteer, stands determined and upright. His mouth is set in a tense line, his arms hang straight under the weight of the keys to Calais, the visual symbol of the town’s surrender, which he holds.

Jacques de Wissant, third to volunteer, is a much more dynamic figure. He has his right arm raised in front of his face, and his left leg stretched behind. His bare leg, exposed up to the thigh, seems vulnerable but it also serves as an inward compositional thrust. He, too, carries a weighty key.

Pierre de Wissant, Jacques’ younger brother, volunteered next. The brothers do not stand together. Such composition brings up a sense of emotional isolation as Pierre looks outward away from the other figures. His raised hand and bent posture create an introverted spiral which seems to suggest agony and doubt. His exposed chest highlights the rope against his bare flesh.

The figure of Andrieu d’Andres, often known simply as the “weeping burgher,” goes a stage further. His lowered head is buried in his hands so that you barely can read his expression. Yet the bent knee and raised left foot imply that he might be falling under the weight of the emotion he feels.

Finally, the youngest burgher, Jean de Fiennes, looks out. With both arms outstretched, he conveys almost an expression of bewilderment.

In one sense, these are highly individualized figures. Their dramatically varied gestures and expressions are like a still shot from the last scene of a staged tragedy. On the other, their plain robes and the repeated motif of the rope almost evoke the same universal figure. This is the “everyman” image designated to represent the stages of life from youth to old age. It goes through a whole range of emotions: grief, doubt, horror and resignation.

How Rodin Worked

Rodin made huge numbers of preparatory pieces for each of the figures. He did work from models, including using his own son, Auguste Beuret, and an artist friend, Jean-Charles Cazin, who claimed to be one of the descendents of Eustache Saint-Pierre. However, the faces of the men became increasingly imagined and generalised as the process went on. Individual likeness was less important than raw, expressive emotion. Rodin also conceived of each figure individually, with the final grouping only coming together slowly.

All the figures were originally worked as nudes, which Rodin then “clothed” by dipping tunics in wet plaster and draping them over the nude bodies. The sense of anatomy beneath remains acute and there is a striking contrast between the heavy vertical folds of the draperies, which seem to drag the figures down, and the naked arms and legs which remain visible. The tunics are like funeral shrouds yet the flesh seems to throb with visible veins and sinews. These are dead men walking.

Body Parts

The Burghers were composite creations. Rodin took plaster models of arms, legs, and torsos and effectively stuck them together to create the final figures. The heads of Andrieu d’Andres and Jean d’Aire are identical, although d’Andres’ is almost completely covered by his hands. The hands and feet of all the figures are deliberately oversized.

Rodin’s way of working is best illustrated by the right hand which he reused for both the de Wissant brothers. For Jacques the hand is raised up in a questioning gesture, almost as if he is asking God what they are doing. In the figure of Pierre, exactly the same hand is held up in front of the figure’s face almost as if he’s about to put his head in his hands in despair.

Rodin reused poses and fragments throughout his career. Many of the figures featured in the Gates of Hell were re-exhibited as individual works, including, most famously, The Thinker, who sits looking down from the top of the Gates. He also frequently exhibited fragmentary body parts. The burghers’ hand was later reincorporated into an independent work, The Hand of God.

A Different Kind of Heroism

Traditionally, statues of heroes have idealized physiques in the style of classical sculpture. Throughout his career, Rodin made attempts to reimagine that ideal. Figures like the Age of Bronze retained an athletic nobility, but clearly defined musculature had been replaced by a rippling complexity of surface, which expresses a greater naturalism. People complained that the Age of Bronze looked like a real man dipped in metal: There were rumors that Rodin had actually cast a living model!

In the Burghers, this naturalism was tempered by the need to show the emotional sacrifice and physical endurance central to the narrative. These men had survived nearly a year of siege. They were starving. And they were convinced they were walking to their death. It is the intensity of those emotions that Rodin is determined to channel. There is an empathy that Rodin strives to create between the sculpture and viewers.

Space, Holes and Confusion

Rodin avoids all the conventions of academic sculpture in the Burghers. There is no compositional focus, nothing to guide the viewer, and instead, you are forced to walk round, to take time to look, to see these six men as individuals. They stand as a group but are isolated in their emotion and their own ways of dealing with the situation they are in: some look out, some look down, none of them interact with each other.

This sense of emotional isolation is made tangible by spaces between the figures. As early twentieth-century German writer Rainer Maria Rilke described, “the only thing uniting them was the air, which bore a quite peculiar relationship to them.”

Still, Rodin cherishes the spaces within the figures. Even more noticeable in the plaster versions are eyes as black holes, open mouths, and the deep folds of drapery and messily overlapping limbs create exaggerated shadows. The elegant surface ripples of Age of Bronze have become gouges, blemishes, and scars. Such all contribute to a sense of bleakness.

No Plinth

One of the most radical departures that Rodin made in the Burghers of Calais was to place the figures essentially on ground level. Traditional heroic sculpture made use of plinths, columns, and bases so that viewers literally had to look up to the figures who were being commemorated. In the case of grouped figures, a pyramid composition was typical, so that again, the viewer’s eye would be drawn upwards toward the center, where the most important figure would be positioned. Here, Rodin wants us to look directly at the six men, standing life-size and almost exactly on our level. In combination with the openness of the composition, we could also literally walk among them. Rodin is making his heroes into ordinary men, but he is also reminding everyone who sees the work that anyone can be a hero.

When the work, now cast in bronze, was originally erected in Calais in 1895, it was fenced off and placed on a high pedestal, against Rodin’s wishes. In 1924 it was finally moved to outside the town hall, on the low plinth he intended.