Release Date: November 4, 2002
Early Rodin Bust Acquired by the National Gallery of Art
with Gift from the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation
Washington, DC--A unique marble portrait bust of J. B. van Berckelaer, an early work by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), has been acquired by the National Gallery of Art with funds from the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation in celebration of the Foundation's 25th anniversary. The bust is on view in the newly opened ground floor sculpture galleries in the National Gallery's West Building.
Rodin was particularly proud of the bust of J. B. van Berckelaer, on which he worked from 1874 to 1875. The elderly Belgian pharmacist offered friendship and support to the sculptor, who was struggling to make a name for himself in Brussels in the 1870s. The Van Berckelaer bust dates from just before Rodin's first great masterpiece as a sculptor, The Age of Bronze. The National Gallery of Art owns a bronze reduction and a life-size plaster version of this statue. The plaster, modeled in 1875-1876 and cast in 1898, was a gift of the Cantor Foundation in 1991.
Van Berckelaer appears with a gnarled, deeply modeled face resembling Hellenistic portraits of poets and philosophers. Rodin described this work to an 1889 interviewer as "another bust I enjoyed making, and one of the best I ever executed. …He had a remarkable head of pure Flemish type, with a slight touch of Greek in it."
Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation
Iris Cantor is the chair and president of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation and CEO and president of Cantor Fitzgerald, Inc. She is a former National Gallery Trustees Council member (1996-2000). Her husband, the late B. Gerald Cantor (d. 1996) was founder and chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald Securities Corporation. The Cantors have been major lenders to National Gallery exhibitions and worked with the Gallery on the 1981 exhibition Rodin Rediscovered, the most visited exhibition in the Gallery's history.
The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation also provided the funds necessary for the National Gallery to purchase the plaster cast of Rodin's Age of Bronze and Aimé-Jules Dalou's Portrait of a Young Boy (Henry Ebenezer Bingham?) (1871/1879), given in honor of the National Gallery's 50th anniversary. The Foundation also donated a didactic display of the lost-wax casting process centered on La Douleur, a small bronze designed for Rodin's Gates of Hell in 1889, and cast for use in the display in 1983. Other Foundation gifts include Rodin's Victoria Sackville-West, Lady Sackville (1913-1914) and Jean d'Aire (model 1884-1889, cast probably early 20th century).
The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation was established in 1978 to promote and encourage the recognition and appreciation of excellence in the arts; to enhance cultural life internationally through the support of art exhibitions, scholarship, and the endowment of galleries at major museums; and to support biomedical research. In 2003 it will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its founding.
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