“A first-rate collection”: Rodin at the National Gallery of Art

Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art. The Simpson Collection at the National Gallery of Art is one of the few remaining private collections assembled with the participation of artist Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). The centenary of Rodin’s death offers an occasion to examine the large number of works that Katherine Seney Simpson and John W. Simpson, the first American collectors to meet Rodin, gave to the Gallery in 1942. In this lecture recorded on May 5, 2017, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain provides an overview of the Simpson collection of drawings and sculptures in bronze, marble, terracotta, and plaster, including Rodin’s portrait of Mrs. Simpson. The Gallery has benefitted since from the generosity of other donors, helping to build, as Yale University art historian Charles Seymour Jr. stated, “a first-rate collection” of works by Rodin.