Camille Claudel's sculpture “The Mature Age” and her break with Rodin

Camille Claudel's sculpture "The Mature Age" of 1899. The second photograph shows the original version of this work, dating from 1894.

The artist's brother, Paul Claudel, described the piece thus: "My sister Camille, imploring, humiliated, on her knees, this superb, this proud woman, and do you know what is being torn from her, at this very moment, before your eyes? It is her soul. It is at once soul, genius, reason, beauty and life."

The appearance of this sculpture is bound up with the most tragic page of Camille's life: after the break with Rodin, or more precisely after he abandoned her, the hereditary mental illness in her family manifested itself with great force, expressing itself in tormenting states, manias and fits of despair. It was then that she destroyed a great many of her works, obsessed by the thought that Rodin meant to steal them.

Rodin led a turbulent love life, while Camille entered a world of solitude, suffering and madness, like the heroine of her own sculptural group: on her knees, bereft of strength and naked, trying in vain to hold back the man whom another woman is leading away.

A work of great power. Some critics regard it as confirmation that Camille Claudel may even have been the greater genius of the two, more so than Rodin.