Large Pénélope

When Bourdelle showed his full-size Penelope at the Salon in Paris in 1912, some critics were dismayed. They called it a curious return to archaism. Penelope is the wife of Odysseus in Homer, the queen who waited about 20 years for him to come home from Troy, and Bourdelle shows her doing nothing but that. One arm lies across her waist, the other hand props up her chin, and the long vertical folds of her tunic fall like the fluting of a Doric column. He had spent seven years on the figure, since 1905, looking hard at small ancient Greek statuettes, and the proportions he arrived at broke with the ideal of beauty the Salon expected. Two women went into her. The face goes back to his first wife, Stéphanie Van Parys, and the pose to his Greek pupil Cléopâtre Sevastos, who later became his second wife. This bronze stands outdoors in the museum's sculpture garden, almost 2.4 metres tall.