Rodin's Bronze Age bronze, Tate Gallery, London, circa 1900

About this postcard

The photograph shows a bronze nude male standing on a low pedestal, right arm raised over his head and left arm bent at the elbow, with dense trees and foliage behind him. The printed caption calls it "Bronze Age," the sculpture usually known as The Age of Bronze, Rodin's first major figure, shown at the Paris Salon in 1877. Its modeling was lifelike enough that critics accused Rodin of casting it from a living model, a charge he answered with photographs of the sitter, the Belgian soldier Auguste Neyt. The Tate Gallery had opened at Millbank in 1897 as the national collection of British art, and a photographic print of a Rodin bronze there records the sculptor's growing standing with British viewers in the years around 1900.