Camille Claudel

Camille Claudel was a French sculptor known for emotionally intense figurative works in bronze and marble, produced both during a long professional and personal collaboration with Auguste Rodin and independently under her own name. Works such as The Waltz and The Age of Maturity display a technical mastery of the human figure in motion comparable to Rodin's own, and her mature independent work increasingly moved toward more personal, psychologically charged subject matter distinct from his influence. Claudel's career was cut short when her family committed her to a psychiatric institution in 1913, where she remained for the last three decades of her life without producing further work, and her long historical eclipse behind Rodin's reputation has been substantially reassessed by later scholarship recognizing her independent achievement.