Child at the Poorhouse

At the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris this work was shown next to paintings by Cézanne, and the sculptor took the opportunity to draw up, with keen critical sense, a sort of balance sheet of his own work, comparing it with the art of the great master (on another occasion he had done so with Michelangelo): he consoled himself that he had not taken the wrong road and noted, with the subtle irony that also shows through, lightly, in his sculptures, that he was in good company in the disfavour of official culture. Rosso's continually repeated assertion that it is impossible to enclose a work within defined lines, just as it is impossible to set limits to nature (again according to the philosophical conception of an indefinable cosmos), finds coherent application in this image of a child wrapped in a woollen shawl, waiting to be handed a little food at the poorhouse: another extremely condensed image, a flashing allusion, an admirable synthesis of a human condition and of the pity it arouses.