Rose Beuret

Rose Beuret lived with Auguste Rodin for fifty-three years, was married to him two weeks before she died, and is the woman in the sculpture that Camille Claudel made about being left. She was a seamstress from the Champagne country who met him in Paris in 1864 when both were about twenty; she modelled for him, kept his studio, and kept his clay damp - which sounds domestic and was technical, because a drying model is a lost one, and she did it for decades in unheated rooms. Their son Auguste-Eugene was born in 1866 and Rodin never formally recognised him. She had no part in the public life that came with fame, was not received by the people who received him, and stayed at Meudon while he was in Paris. Claudel's The Mature Age, in which an older woman leads a man away from a younger one on her knees, was read at once as being about the three of them, and Rodin used his influence to stop the bronze being cast at state expense. He married Rose in January 1917 at their house at Meudon; she died of pneumonia two weeks later, and he died in November. They are buried together under a cast of The Thinker. Almost nothing survives in her own words. Rodin made several portraits of her over the decades, including Mignon and the Bellona, and the later ones show the ageing plainly. Their son died in 1934 in an institution. The house at Meudon is part of the Musee Rodin.

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