BOLESLAS BIEGAS (1877-1954) THE STRAIN Bronze with brown patina Signed and numbered '3/8 Foundry stamp 'Rosini/Fondeur d'art à la cire/Paris' Posthumous casting, the terracotta model designed in 1925 Bronze with brown patina; signed and numbered '2/8'; stamped with the foundry mark 'Rosini/Fondeur d'art à la cire/Paris'; posthumous cast, the terracotta model designed in 1925 H. 36 CM - 14 1/8 IN. "Your modeller's thumb is expert. The material obeys admirably to the slightest inflections of your skilful and feverish fingers. Your craft is not the one you are taught, but the one that comes naturally to you, from your brain that conceives and gives birth. You make the block of clay talk and twitch as if the whole human organism were imprisoned within it. A mouth, a forehead, eyes are much more than flesh to you: they are above all a thought, a will, a feeling. Nothing interests you, unless that nothing contributes to expression. That's why I love you most of all in your struggle with deep, shivering reality, which you endow with such intensity that the human soul appears in it as it does in true masters." Émile Verhaeren, Boleslas Biegas, sculpteur et peintre: album, Louis Theuveny Édition, Paris: s.d. (1906), p. 11.