Camille Claudel

Claudel worked stone herself at a time when women were expected to model in clay at most, and her Sakuntala and The Waltz were praised by critics who could not quite believe the hand behind them. She entered Rodin's studio as an assistant and became his collaborator and his lover; much of what is admired in his work of those years passed through her hands. She broke with him in the 1890s and worked alone in poverty, increasingly convinced that he was stealing her ideas — a suspicion that was part delusion and part an accurate reading of how the credit was being divided.

Eight days after her father died in 1913, her family had her committed. She was moved to Montdevergues, near Avignon, and stayed there thirty years. The doctors repeatedly wrote that she could be discharged; her mother refused, and her brother Paul, the celebrated poet, visited seven times in three decades. She sculpted nothing again. She died during the wartime famine in French asylums and was buried in a communal plot that was cleared in 1954; her remains cannot be located. A marker was placed at Montfavet in 2017 — there is no grave.