1/6/23 - Acquisition - Stockholm, Nationalmuseum - Although its collections include a fine group of sculptures and drawings by Auguste Rodin, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm previously held no works by his pupil, assistant and companion Camille Claudel. This gap has now been filled, as the Swedish museum has acquired a version of Dream by the Fire, one of the artist’s most popular works, from the Galerie Malaquais in Paris. Previously held in a private collection in France, the small polychrome statue joins a body of work in Stockholm that has been actively expanded in recent years to include some thirty works by a dozen women sculptors active in the 1900s (see news item of 21/1/21). This acquisition policy was reflected in last year’s exhibition devoted to Swedish women sculptors active at the turn of the twentieth century ["Quel bonheur d’être sculpteur !", Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, 17 March to 11 September 2022]].
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- Camille Claudel (1864-1943)
Dream by the Fire, 1899-1905
Sand casting Eugène Blot between1905 and 1937
Marble and bronze - 22 x 29 x 24,5 cm
Stockholm, Nationalmuseum
Photo: Viktor Fordell/Nationalmuseum - See the image in its page
As stated in the detailed notice of the Malaquais gallery preparing the Catalogue critique de l’œuvre de Camille Claudel by the Comité Camille Claudel under the direction of Ève Turbat, Dream by the Fire belongs to the series of what the artist herself called her "small things", her "sketches from life" executed from the early 1890s to the early 1900s. This group of small subjects consists of The Bavardes (1893-1905), Woman Reading a Letter (c. 1895-1897), The Wave (1897-1903) and the two "Fireplace", the Deep Thought created in 1898, also known as The Christmas Log, and Dream by the Fire or By the Hearth or Woman Seated in Front of a Fireplace or By the Fire. Showing a woman sitting on a chair, her head resting on the lintel of a fireplace, Dream by the Fire was commissioned in marble, probably in 1899, by the Countess de Maigret, Camille Claudel’s main patron at the time, before being exhibited the following year, in the same material, at the Universal Exhibition in Paris.
Like Deep Thought, it was then presented at the exhibition of Camille Claudel’s works organised by her publisher and dealer Eugène Blot in 1905, in his gallery on the Boulevard de la Madeleine. There, the two "Chimney" were presented in a marble and bronze proof edited by Eugène Blot, who specified in the exhibition catalogue that the Deep Thought was an edition limited to fifty copies, while no print-run limit was indicated for Dream by the Fire. After the 1905 exhibition, the two "Chimney" were offered for permanent sale at the Eugène Blot gallery, some with a pilot light inside the hearth, connected to electricity. For Dream by the Fire, the edition seems to have begun in 1905 and ended in 1937, when Blot sold his models of Camille Claudel with their printing rights to Leblanc-Barbedienne. The print acquired by Stockholm is signed on the left terrace "C. CLAUDEL", bears the founder’s stamp "EUG. BLOT / PARIS" and is numbered "n°16".
Although it is established, according to documents drawn up in 1937 by Eugène Blot, that sixty-five copies of Dream by the Fire were printed, only two proofs of the Blot edition are preserved in public collections. One, unnumbered, in white marble and bronze, is in the Musée Camille Claudel à Nogent-sur-Seine while the other, numbered 19, in coloured marble and bronze, entered the collections of the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington in 2017 thanks to a gift from Wilhelmina Cole Holladay. Mention should also be made of the two marble versions that were executed before Eugène Blot acquired the model in 1905. The first version, commissioned by the Comtesse de Maigret, remained in her family until it was donated by Marie-Joséphe de Touzalin Dunaway to the Legion of Honor in San Francisco->https://www.famsf.org/artworks/reve-au-coin-du-feu-dreaming-by-the-fireside] in 2018. It is undated, but bears the signature "Camille Claudel". The second version, signed and dated on the left-hand side of the plinth of the base "C. Claudel 1903", is kept by the Musée de Draguignan, to which it was donated by Alphonse de Rothschild in 1904.