Kneeling Female Nude with Head Thrown Back, Front View

The Vase Woman series is one of the finest in Rodin’s corpus of drawings. The figures are stylized to the extreme, the artist’s intended idea eclipsing the female body itself. In 1911, Rodin said to Paul Gsell, “I have often asked a model to sit on the ground with her back to me, her arms and legs gathered in front of her. In this position the back, which tapers to the waist and swells at the hips, appears like a vase of exquisite outline, the amphora that contains the life of the future within it.” Although Rodin insisted on the metaphor of fecundity, it is not the only key to interpretation. In this drawing―the most stylized in the series―Rodin seems to have reduced the female body to its simplest expression: a curve. The head has disappeared backwards, while the fairly dark skin tones recall the ocher of terracotta and stand out sharply from the background.

The navel―the only anatomical detail―is what links the vase shape to the theme of fecundity. There is also the idea of metamorphosis, the artist playing on corresponding forms to suggest the emergence of life.