Aristide Maillol

Aristide Maillol did not become a sculptor until he was nearly 40. Born in the Catalan south of France, he began as a painter and tapestry-maker in the circle of the Nabis, but his eyesight began to fail at the loom, and he turned to modelling in clay. Almost at once he found his lifelong subject: the standing or seated female nude, calm, solid and weighty, stripped of story or drama.

Where the great sculptor Rodin, just before him, made bronze churn with emotion, Maillol wanted stillness, a return to the balance of ancient Greek sculpture. His figures sit and stand at rest, thinking of nothing in particular, their power all in the quiet mass of the body. His early masterwork, a crouching woman later called The Mediterranean, is exactly that, a whole seated figure folded into a serene pyramid.

In his last years a young woman named Dina Vierny modelled for him and became the keeper of his legacy. Maillol died in 1944, near the end of the Second World War, when the car he was riding in crashed on a road near his home town of Banyuls.