Thought (Portrait of Camille Claudel)

Camille Claudel met Rodin while studying at the Acad�mie Colarossi in 1883, and became his colleague and mistress. They separated in the mid-1890s. After the separation, creative difficulties and crippling loneliness increasingly hampered her work, and she was committed to a psychiatric institution in 1913, where she remained until her death in 1943.

In 1886 Rodin began modeling a portrait of Camille Claudel in traditional costume. When his assistant Victor Peter, executing the work in marble, reached the collar, Rodin made him stop: the head emerging from the block offered the contrast, as in Michelangelo, of a finished section imprisoned in the rough-hewn stone. This triumph of sculpture was exhibited as it was at the Salon in 1895, entitled Head. Only later did it receive its Symbolist title of Thought Emerging from Matter, then simply Thought.