When Is a Bronze an Original?

Most people assume a bronze sculpture is an original because the artist made it. Bronze doesn't work that way. "Original" is a rule about who authorised a cast and how many of them exist — not a fact about whose hands touched the metal — which is why Rodin's The Gates of Hell, never cast in bronze while he was alive, now exists as eight legitimate originals, while a perfect copy taken from any one of them would be a reproduction at best and a forgery at worst.

The artist's hand stops earlier than most buyers realise. In lost-wax casting, the sculptor shapes the clay, plaster or wax model; the mould, the wax copy, the pour, the chasing and the patina all belong to the foundry. Every bronze is already a cast of a cast. The real question was never whether a bronze is a copy. It's which copies count.

At a glance

Every bronze starts as a copy

Rodin shows how early the artist's hand leaves the process. According to the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, one of the major collectors of his work, he had very little to do with a sculpture once it left his modelling stand, trusting trained assistants to carry out his intentions; one museum guide adds that he reportedly never set foot in the foundries that cast his bronzes. That was ordinary practice for a busy sculptor — the same division of labour that let his studio scale small plasters up into monuments. The finish collectors judge a cast by, the chasing that hides the seams and the patina that gives the metal its colour, was craftsmen's work even in his lifetime.

The rule of eight plus four

European law draws the line at eight. The EU's VAT directive treats a sculpture cast as a work of art only if production is limited to eight copies supervised by the artist or the artist's successors in title, and British and Irish VAT rules apply the same eight-copy limit. France goes further. Since the late 1960s a French bronze edition has been allowed eight numbered casts, marked 1/8 to 8/8, plus up to four artist's proofs marked EA I/IV to EA IV/IV, for épreuve d'artiste. A 1981 decree requires any copy, aftercast or other reproduction to be described as one, and anything cast after it to carry the word "Reproduction" visibly and indelibly.

Four proofs against eight numbered casts is a far bigger allowance than printmaking's, where artist's proofs traditionally run to about a tenth of the edition. The proofs were nominally meant to stay out of trade, but French tax authorities accept them as original works alongside the numbered eight. The limit also runs model by model, and only for models the artist made. French case law requires an original bronze to be cast from a model the same size as the artist's own, so an enlargement or reduction commissioned after the artist's death can't start a new original edition.

In the United States there's no federal equivalent: edition sizes are set by artists, estates and foundries, and the College Art Association's standards for posthumous casting are voluntary. None of this makes a multiple a lesser object. Alberto Giacometti's Walking Man I exists in an edition of six plus four artist's proofs, and one of those ten sold at Sotheby's London in February 2010 for £65 million, about $104.3 million — then the highest price ever paid for a sculpture at auction. Scarcity in bronze is engineered, just as it is in a limited-edition print.

When the sculptor is dead

Rodin left the French state his studio, his unsold work and permission to keep casting it, and the Musée Rodin has done so ever since. Since 1956, French law has limited the museum to twelve casts of each work at each size; under the numbering adopted in 1981, the eight numbered casts can be sold and the four proofs are reserved for cultural institutions. Three of his most important works — The Gates of Hell, the Monument to Balzac and the Monument to Victor Hugo — were never cast while he lived. The French state set aside 35,000 francs in 1885 to cast the Gates and never called on the money. The first bronze Gates were poured in 1926–28, after the American collector Jules Mastbaum ordered two: one for the Rodin museum he was founding in Philadelphia, one for the Musée Rodin in Paris. Eight casts now exist; the most recent was finished in 2015 for the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City. Every one is posthumous, and every one is an original.

Degas is the harder case. When he died in September 1917, his heirs found about 150 sculptures in wax, clay and plastiline around his apartment and studio, many of them damaged. Only one had ever been shown in public: the Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, exhibited in wax and dressed in real fabric at the Impressionist exhibition of 1881. Degas hadn't favoured turning his sculptures into bronze, and according to research published by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, he never cast any of them or authorised anyone else to. His heirs did. A contract signed in May 1918 with the Hébrard foundry set each edition at twenty casts for sale, plus one for the founder and one for the family. From late 1919 the foundry's master caster, Albino Palazzolo, cast seventy-four figures, and the first set — edition A — went to the collector Louisine Havemeyer. Hébrard also kept back a set of bronze master casts, which stayed out of public view for decades.

By the rules, the Hébrard bronzes are originals: the artist's successors supervised them, and the editions were limited. The market agrees. On 12 May 2022, a Little Dancer cast in 1927, a decade after Degas died, sold at Christie's New York for $41.61 million — a record for any work by Degas at auction. Prints raise the same lifetime-versus-posthumous question, and the Great Wave's late impressions are the woodblock version of it.

A second family of posthumous Degas bronzes complicates things further. Around 2004, seventy-four plasters surfaced at the Valsuani foundry outside Paris, presented as casts taken from Degas's waxes in his lifetime, and new bronze editions were cast from them; the Degas estate authenticated the plasters and the bronzes in 2007. Most Degas specialists remain unconvinced. Gary Tinterow, then head of nineteenth-century, modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said nothing showed that Degas had a set of plasters made of his sculptures during his lifetime, and the scholar Patricia Failing has said there is no historical evidence that any of the Valsuani plasters date from it. The plasters do have defenders: Steven Nash, then director of the Palm Springs Art Museum, told ARTnews in 2010 that the preponderance of evidence pointed to plasters made mostly in Degas's lifetime. Both families of bronzes carry the estate's approval. Only one has the specialists' confidence.

Surmoulage: the copy that shrinks

A surmoulage, or aftercast, is a mould taken from a finished bronze rather than from the artist's model. Molten bronze shrinks as it cools, so a cast taken from a cast comes out slightly smaller than its source, and fine detail softens along the way. Rodin met the word as an insult long before it was a market problem: in 1877 critics accused him of having cast The Age of Bronze straight from a living model. Under French law since 1981, an aftercast is a reproduction and has to be described as one.

The most damaging fakes didn't always need that shortcut. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the French dealer and founder Guy Hain had Rodin bronzes cast from genuine plasters and moulds as well as from aftercasts, then gave them the stamp of Alexis Rudier, the foundry that had cast for Rodin in his lifetime, so buyers would take them for early casts. Police eventually seized about twenty tonnes of bronzes, Hain went to prison, and the court-appointed expert Gilles Perrault estimated that more than 6,000 others were already in circulation. The metal was right; the mark was the lie — and even a genuine Alexis Rudier stamp proves less than buyers hope, because the foundry kept putting it on Rodin casts until 1952, decades after his death. A foundry stamp, like an artist's signature, is a statement of authorship, and statements can be forged.

Checking a bronze before you buy

1. Read the base. Look for an edition number, such as 3/8 or EA II/IV, a foundry stamp and, often, a cast date.
2. Ask who authorised the cast, and when. Lifetime, estate-authorised, or neither — and get the answer in writing.
3. Compare it with a documented cast. Measure it and check the detail against a known cast of the same model; an aftercast runs small and soft.
4. Check the number against the records. Edition numbers can be duplicated or invented, so confirm them with the artist's catalogue, committee or foundry archive.
5. Judge the finish. Chasing and patina were foundry work from the start, and they vary from cast to cast.

Beyond those checks, a bronze is valued much the way a fine-art print is: on condition, documentation and provenance.

The bottom line

A bronze is never the artist's hand in the way a carving or a drawing is; it starts life as a cast of a cast. What makes one "original" is a set of rules about who authorised it and how many exist — eight plus four proofs in France, eight under EU tax law, no statute at all in the United States — and those rules comfortably include casts made decades after the sculptor died. Ask of any bronze not whether the artist touched it, but who authorised it, how many siblings it has, and whether its paperwork and its proportions agree.