There are still restaurants in the smaller cities of France where local functionaries and dignitaries lunch every day—places where the regulars have their own napkin rings. There are no surprises in these solid, reassuring establishments. The classic, substantial dishes of la cuisine bourgeoise never change, apart from subtle responses to what is in season. The ingredients are excellent, and everything is prepared with skill and care. There may be a little more butter than current urban taste dictates, but the diner is assured of pleasure and satisfaction.

As this fall’s splendid exhibition at Marlborough Gallery made clear, the sculpture of Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) can be described more or less the same way.[1]The analogy is emphasized by the remarkable “tasting menu” with which the exhibition began: a vitrine of twenty small sculptures spanning four decades of the artist’s career, from a kneeling washerwoman dated 1896 to a seated nude of his model and muse, Dina Vierny, dated 1937. As in the best of those comforting restaurants in the French provinces, there was nothing startling here, apart from the happy surprise of being able to see so many of these wonderful little pieces together. The array of sturdy bronzes, none over twelve inches in its largest dimension, constituted a (literally) miniature retrospective. It was not only an accounting of the principal themes and poses that Maillol pursued throughout his long life as a sculptor, but also a preview of the larger, better-known works—half-life-size, life-size, and monumental—that made up