THE ARKIN İSKELE
ART GALLERY

In 1871, Rodin travelled to Brussels to join his former employer Carrier-Belleuse. Shortly after, Rodin’s artistic circles expanded entering partnerships with sculptors like Antoine Van Rasbourg, another former employee of Carrier-Belleuse and Antoine-Félix Bouré. Although trained at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels and the Academy of Fine Arts at Florence, Bouré was co-founder of The Société Libre des Beaux-Arts, an organization formed in 1868 by Belgian artists to react against academicism and to advance Realist painting and artistic freedom inspired by Gustav Courbet and Charles Baudelaire.

Bouré and Rodin become good friends, working on a number of projects together throughout the 1870s. In 1877, Bouré was one of the sculptors who offered testimony on behalf of Rodin during a controversy over The Vanquished, later retitled The Age of Bronze. Rodin had been accused of casting the work from a live model, using a technique known as surmoulage; Bouré confirmed Rodin's work methods from his own observations in the studio.