Jeanne Prinet

This work, acquired by the museum in 2005, reminds us that although Bourdelle moved away from working with marble as the years went by, he nonetheless made some of his most delicate works in this medium. With this bust, Bourdelle depicted the wife of the painter René-Xavier Prinet (1861-1946), who was not only his neighbour in Impasse du Maine, but also his colleague at the Grande Chaumière Academy. While the delicate face and the apparent incompleteness of the marble show how much Bourdelle owed to the aesthetic of Rodin, with whom he worked for fifteen years as a'praticien', this work conveys a sense of synthesis and construction which, in these crucial years, would gave rise to indisputable masterpieces