Comparison 4: Rodin and the Rough Process
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Auguste Rodin
Bust of Rochefort (c. 1884-1898)
Plaster sculpture, w43.5 cm x h72.5 cm x d44 cm (135.86" x 61.06")
Musee Rodin, Paris, France
Rodin (of 'The Thinker' fame, and working about the same time as Van Gogh) was an artist who deliberately sought to keep signs of his work process visible in the work. Although many of his full pieces ended up in bronze, he almost always started in a material that could be worked directly by the hands, allowing immediacy and spontaneity to create the form. He was also perfectly happy to leave pieces looking 'unfinished'.
We see the movement in the handling with sculpture here as we saw it with the ink in Van Gogh's drawing. One interesting point of difference is that while Van Gogh's Peasant has about the same level of detail/types of marks across the whole surface, Rodin has more highly polished the details of the face here, leaving it to contrast more sharply with the near-careless approach elsewhere (the clothing especially).