Maillol’s breath-taking oeuvre played a major role in the revitalisation of the sculptural tradition at the outset of the twentieth century.

Maillol’s career as a painter with the Nabis, played a significant role within his work. Even after turning his energies more significantly to sculpture from the late-1890s, Maillol continued painting and drawing. All his life he remained close friends with Nabis artists Bonnard, Valtat, Vuillard and Matisse.

Yet even more than painting or sculpture, drawing remained Maillol’s busiest activity. It was a kind of daily writing for him, and he relied on it to develop ideas for his oeuvre. Describing his practices ‘this is how I work – its all drawn form nature- you say that girls don’t walk around naked true enough but I undress them- I fill one notebook every month.’

Drawing was not just a script for noting forms it constituted a distinct style, a translation of his thoughts. Maillol sought to express volumes rather than outlines. Unlike Rodin’s quick notations of lines or Degas mathematical accuracy, Maillol was not obsessed with truth to life. He wanted art to be alive rather than scrupulously exact.

His intimate yet eternal visions of feminine beauty, possess a profound simplicity and harmony, a sense of the eternal and absolute, and a commanding self-contained power.

After exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne from its foundation in 1903, including the famous Salon of 1905 that marked the public début of the Fauves, Maillol soon won important private patronage and critical acclaim. In the 1920s and 30s from when “Modèle” dates Maillol was engaged on many commissioned public monuments to the war dead, creating works characteristic for their intensity and beauty and which transformed the vocabulary and reach of this genre.