Conceived in 1894, this example was cast between 1906 and 1918. In 1898 Thiebaut Frères, Fumiere & Gavigniot successeurs began a ten-year contract to produce an unlimited edition of this model. In 1908 the contract was renewed for a further ten years. It is known that at least fifty bronzes were cast between 1898 and 1918.

Rodin first modelled the old woman seen in this group as a single figure in 1885 known as She Who Was The Helmet Maker’s Beautiful Wife after a poem by François Villon. Albert Elsen comments:

‘When one looks closely at Rodin’s Old Woman, the longer the figure is studied, the more conscious the
viewer becomes not of biography but of sculpture. Far from illustrating a medieval French poem about an
ageing beauty lamenting her lost youth, Rodin found a timeless experience in the living model’s own rich
story and the capacity of her aged body to inspire a stunningly powerful form.’

This sculpture is an assemblage of the old woman combined with that of a reclining young woman, which Rodin also produced as an individual sculpture, known as Fatigue. Throughout his career Rodin pioneered the technique of creating entirely new works by reusing sculptures he had already made and assembling them into groups, sometimes repeating the same figure as with his Shades. Rodin’s ingenuity resides in the fact that he took casting in multiples, the intrinsic method of making bronzes, and made it a systematic part of his creative process.

The work was first exhibited publically in 1896 in marble at the Paris salon, a bronze version being shown in Berlin in 1903. This work has several different titles, Triumphant Youth, Eternal Youth, Fate and The Convalescent, The Grandmother’s Kiss, Old Age and Adolescence, Young Girl and Fate. The symbolic interpretations are always a source of discussion but contrary to the most accepted title, youth is in fact embracing old age, as all mortals have to in the end.