Page 42 - Studio International - July/August 1967

Rodin's 'Walking Man' as seen by Henry Moore

Albert Elsen in collaboration with Henry Moore

Rodin's Walking Man is a haunting sculpture for artist
and art historian. For Henry Moore, 'The Walking Man
has everything in it that I love about Rodin, especially
his wonderful sense of the human figure'. Longer than the
seven years he has owned a superb Alexis Rudier cast
of this work, Moore has known, admired and reflected
on what is certainly one of Rodin's best sculptures. (It is
so placed in his home so that he can see it daily.)
Although he remembers that only one work he ever did,
the head of an old man which was kept by one of his art
school teachers, was ever directly influenced by this
great artist, (specifically The Old Courtesan), Moore likes
to talk about the many things he learned from such
sculptures as the Walking Man.
According to Rodin, the Walking Man derived from his
fortuitous encounter, presumably around 1877, with an
Abruzzi peasant named Pignatelli who offered his un-
tested services as a model: 'Seeing him I was seized with
admiration: that rough hairy man, expressing in his
bearing and physical strength all the violence, but also
the mystical character of his race. I thought immediately
of St John the Baptist....The peasant undressed, mounted
the model's stand as if he had never posed, he planted
himself, head up, torso straight, at the same time support-
ed on his two legs, opened like a compass. The movement
was so right, so determined, and so true that I cried: "But
it's a walking man!" I immediately resolved to make
what I had seen.... It was thus that I made the Walking
Man and John the Baptist. I only copied the model whom
chance had sent me.'1
For a long time it was assumed that the Walking Man
dated from 1877-8. In the last few years it has been
apparent that the torso has an earlier and separate exist-
ence from the legs, (a point which Moore observed on his
own), and might possibly have survived as a fragment
from a previous sculpture, such as one of Joshua which
Rodin had made in Belgium before returning to Paris in
the Spring of 1877, and which was later destroyed by
accident. From letters written to his wife in Brussels in
1877, we know Rodin was worried about further breakage
of this clay figure which had not been cast in plaster.
Rodin also gave instructions in these letters to his assis-
tants concerning the Joshua. 'Make a clay sketch, suc-
cessful in movement, that will be ready for my return.'2
We have no photograph or contemporary description
of the Walking Man before what seems to have been its
first exhibition in 1900. The torso in the Petit Palais was