Camille Claudel

Camille Claudel was a sculptor of the first rank whose family had her committed at forty-eight and left her in asylums for the last thirty years of her life. She began modelling clay as a child, persuaded her father to move the family to Paris so she could study, and worked in Rodin's studio from about 1884 as assistant, model and lover - she carved hands and feet on his commissions, which was skilled work he trusted to few. Her own sculpture is not derivative of his: The Waltz, Clotho, and above all The Mature Age, in which a young woman on her knees reaches after a man being led away by an older woman, and which Rodin took as a public accusation about himself and Rose Beuret. The state cancelled its commission for the bronze after his intervention. She broke with him in 1892, worked alone in increasing poverty and isolation, and from about 1905 destroyed much of her own work in periods of paranoia. Eight days after her father died in 1913 her family had her committed; her mother and sister never visited, her brother the poet Paul Claudel visited rarely, and the doctors wrote repeatedly that she could be released. She was not. She died in an asylum near Avignon in 1943 and was buried in a communal grave. A museum devoted to her opened at Nogent-sur-Seine in 2017. Her brother Paul Claudel became one of the major French poets and dramatists of the century and a diplomat. Around ninety of her works survive. A 1988 film with Isabelle Adjani brought the story to a wide audience.

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