Acquisition · Fate and Love, sculpture by Gustave Doré

outstanding large patinated plaster sculpture

Gustave Doré
*La Parque et l'Amour*, 1877
Musée d'Orsay
Achat, 2023
© Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Sophie Crépy
See the notice of the artwork

Acknowledged very early on as one of the great draftsmen, caricaturists and illustrators of his day, Gustave Doré (1832 - 1883) aspired to a more rounded and prestigious form of artistic glory, to be obtained first of all by painting and then by sculpture. He exhibited his first canvases at the 1851 Salon when he was just 19 years old, and wasted no time in producing numbers of large-format works of ambitious composition. Although he waited until 1877 to present his first sculpted work at the Salon, it was with very much the same ambition, as is made clear by the imposing patinated plaster sculpture of Fate and Love that Musée d'Orsay recently purchased. The sculpture is a worthy addition to a group of the artist’s drawings, paintings and sculptures in the Museum’s collections.

In it, Gustave Doré turns his hand to a relatively classical theme, the close relationship between love and death, Eros and Thanatos. Nonetheless, he brings a new perspective to his subject, inventive in its interpretation of the relationship between the two figures: Fate, massive and austere, dominates Love, depicted as a comely youth lounging nonchalantly between the sorrowful-looking old woman’s knees. Originally (as can be seen in old images and small-scale copies of the subject), a string connecting the two figures provided the key to the composition: at one end, it formed the string of the bow Eros used to arouse love in mortals’ hearts, but continued on its way to run between the blades of the scissors that Fate has in her right hand, identifying her as Atropos, the third and oldest Fate who cuts the thread of life; the string continued on through Love’s and then Fate’s left hand, before wending its way down to the terrace, to a distaff that has also disappeared.

Pingeot Anne, Gustave Doré, La Parque et l'Amour, groupe plâtre, Salon 1877 — *Fate and Love. Facsimile of a drawing by Saint-Elme Gauthier after Gustave Doré, published in L’Art, vol.9, 1877, p.147.*
© Documentation du musée d'Orsay / Anne Pingeot

Critics were impressed by the large sculpture’s ambitiousness and the ease the artist demonstrated in this new medium, but they also reproached Doré for his unquenchable thirst for glory, as if he was incapable of resting on the laurels he had already earned in the fields of drawing and painting. The work wasn’t acquired by the State, much to its creator’s displeasure. He sent it to London soon afterwards, to be exhibited in the Doré Gallery, and undertook to have it reproduced in the form of miniatures (terracotta versions in Bourg-en-Bresse and Strasbourg; bronze in Ottawa).

Included in the sale held after Gustave Doré’s death in 1885, it was acquired (with reproduction rights) by the founder Victor Thiébaut, who undoubtedly hoped to cast a bronze version of the sculpture, as he had done for other of the artist’s subjects. It didn’t happen and the piece then made its way into the collection amassed by Paul Doumet-Adanson, who installed it in his Château de Balaine in Villeneuve-sur-Allier in 1891. More recently, it became a showpiece in the decorator Jacques Garcia’s château. Fate and Love was on display at Musée d'Orsay in 2014 for the exhibition “Gustave Doré. Master of Imagination” (curated by Philippe Kaenel, Paul Lang and Édouard Papet).