A statue by the French artist Auguste Rodin has been missing from the Glasgow Museum for the better part of a century, according to the Guardian, and it is not the first time a work by the famous sculptor has gone missing from the museum’s archives.
According to the Comité Rodin, this missing sculpture is a six-and-a-half-foot plaster version of Jean d’Aire, one of the six figures in Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais. The Glasgow Museum bought the work in 1901 from Rodin himself, and from June 25 through September 30, 1949, the statue was displayed in Kelvingrove Park in the city’s West End.
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The Comité Rodin’s director, Jérôme le Blay, told Agence France-Presse that while the unknown location of the statue is “regrettable, [the situation] must be put into the context of the times.”
Le Blay said plaster works “did not arouse much interest in the 1940s,” and it’s likely that the statue of Jean d’Aire suffered the same fate as another plaster work by Rodin on display at Kelvingrove Park at the same time: it was damaged, and whatever parts remained were transferred to Glasgow Museum Resource Center and found years later.
According to Le Blay, today the statue would be worth around £3 million ($3.69 million). Plaster and bronze versions of Rodin’s Les Bourgeois de Calais are exhibited around the globe, most notably in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A Rodin work vanishing from a museum’s holding is not as uncommon is it might sound. A report by the Times of London says the missing Rodin is just one of nearly 1,750 works that have gone missing from Scottish museums.