In 1899, the thirty-year-old novice Henri Matisse showed a group of his drawings to the fifty-nine-year-old master Auguste Rodin. To the younger man’s surprise and dismay, Rodin dismissed his work, saying that he had a “facile hand” and advising him to “fuss over his drawings” over a period of weeks. Matisse, in turn, was shocked by Rodin’s practice of dismantling and modifying existing sculptures, recycling limbs, hands, and torsos as needed to form new configurations. The two never met again in the studio, but Matisse’s hurt endured; thirty-eight years later, writing an essay about drawing, he spoke of the unhelpfulness of Rodin’s response, although he elsewhere attributed the older artist’s lack of enthusiasm—and bad advice—to unavoidable generational differences. Yet, at the end of 1899, soon after this disappointing encounter, Matisse reserved a painting and a sculpture from the dealer Ambroise Vollard, a small Paul Cézanne of three female bathers and a plaster Bust of Rochefort by Rodin: works that the young painter felt he must acquire, despite his limited means, because he esteemed them greatly and felt that studying them closely over a prolonged period was essential to his evolution as an artist.

When Matisse gave his treasured little Cézanne to the Museum of the City of Paris in 1936, he wrote that the painting “sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist.” He said nothing comparable about his Rodin plaster, but he drew from it several times soon after he acquired