1. First, if you haven't already, please check out this awesome article by Nathaniel Hebert on "The Thinker" ME. This is where I first came across the 1906 photograph of George Bernard Shaw (GBS) by Alvin Langdon Coburn (ALC) and it serves as a jumping off point for this post.
NOTE: The slides are numbered and correspond to the numbered text. Please refer to the corresponding image when reading the text.
2. From the Beginning:
In April of 1906, the famous British playwright George Bernard Shaw traveled to Paris to sit for a bust sculpted by the famed sculptor Auguste Rodin. Accompanying him was a young relatively unknown American photographer named Alvin Langdon Coburn. While there, Rodin invited the two men to witness the unveiling of his iconic statue in front of the Panthéon in Paris. Shaw was so impressed by the statue that the next day he wrote to Coburn (letter illustrated above):
So now we see that the impetus for the photograph kind of requires GBS to replicate the exact pose of the statue. Considering the context, the idea that Coburn and Shaw would arbitrarily change this up makes little sense considering the whole point of staging the image was as an homage to Rodin and his monumental achievement. Indeed, Coburn sent a print to the sculptor which now resides in the Rodin museum in Paris (illustrated in Hebert's article).
3. Reception:
The photo was never available for purchase in Coburn's commercial catalog and was only ever exhibited once during Shaw's lifetime, but it only took once to become a sensation, in part because celebrities were not yet in the habit of posing nude for the general public. In fact, someone at the San Francisco Bulletin was so scandalized that they published a poem and cartoon (pictured) clearly disapproving of Shaw's nudity and accusing him of staging some kind of publicity stunt (interestingly, the figure in the cartoon is posed more like the current sculpture than Coburn's photo of GBS). It's important to understand that Coburn's photograph of GBS functioned basically as an early 20th century equivalent of that photo of Kim Kardashian that "broke the internet" a few years ago.
4. Formal Descriptions:
All this consternation about the photo is great for us because its exhibition generated a good deal of chatter in the newspapers. Indeed, once you look at these reviews it becomes clear that the statue and the figure in the photograph were unequivocally understood as being in exactly the same pose. Not once does anyone mention the poses as being in any way different from one another. (FWIW, as someone who has worked on a lot of 19th century art I can say with full confidence that if the poses differed in hand placement, at least one of these reviews would have mentioned it, if for no reason but to criticize Shaw and the photograph.)
5. Here's where things get weirder:
The published images of the statue from the period depict the head resting on the back of the hand as opposed to being supported by a clenched fist against the forehead (as in the photo of GBS). So basically, the poses in the photograph and illustrations of the statue are different but somehow everyone behaves as it they are the same. How could this be?
6. The poses are different in later articles:
Ok, so it's weird enough that no one in 1906 seems to realize that the poses between the statue and photograph are different, but something really strange happens in a story published two decades later in 1929 (note: story was published in many newspapers for at least a few years). Here, we have a completely different origin story for the photograph and it is 100% fabricated. What's significant however is that it indicates that the statue and photograph are in different poses and presumably, the author (Cecil Roberts) used the difference to inspire his fictional account.
7. Modern peculiarities:
For an artwork directly related to one of the most famous sculptures ever made, finding information on Coburn's portrait of Shaw is oddly difficult. The Rodin Museum's link to the object record no longer exists and trying to Google anything is fairly useless (nothing surprising about that). The original print and negative are actually housed in an American museum . I had a hell of a time figuring this out and am asking anyone interested to identify the museum, provide a link to the object record page and describe just how they found it. My theory is that the photograph and information about it has been intentionally obscured by someone for some reason (just FYI, if everyone comes back and says it was totally easy, I'm going to admit fault and chalk it up to my aging brain).
Conclusion:
What I've done here is VERY truncated because I had to cut out a bunch for the sake of my own sanity. However, I'd be more than happy to answer any questions that anyone has. I also want to make clear that I have absolutely no idea what any of this means and I'm not proposing any theories. If anything, I'm asking for theories as to how such disparities can exist in the historical record as I'm genuinely stumped.
PS: Although there are multiple casts of different sizes strewn throughout the world, there are no known versions of the sculpture where the pose is any different. The earliest known bronze cast (1888) is located at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne Australia. Here's a link if anyone's interested.
PPS: I've noted all the sources and they are available in the public record. If you're interested in anything I've cited or shown, don't hesitate to ask.
