The art historian Ruth Butler was working on her Ph.D. in the late 1950s when she first visited the Musée Rodin in Paris. She would later remember being struck by an arresting plaster portrait of Rose Beuret, Auguste Rodin’s first muse and long-suffering life partner.
Her hair was tangled, as if windblown. Her gaze was penetrating. She was beautiful. Ms. Butler thought the sculpture was the most engaging piece in the room. The museum’s catalog noted the relationship, describing Rose as “hidden in the shadow of the master.”
On the same visit, Ms. Butler spotted a small oil painting of an apprehensive-looking woman who seemed to be holding back tears. It was described simply as the only existing portrait of the sculptor’s mother; little was known about her, the catalog said, except that she was very pious.
Decades later, when Ms. Butler was researching what would become her expansive and definitive 1993 biography, “Rodin: The Shape of Genius,” the painting was still in the museum — and still identified as Rodin’s mother. But by then, Ms. Butler knew better. It was a portrait of Rose.
“I said, ‘That’s ridiculous,’” she told The New York Times. “I thought that if even the Musée Rodin doesn’t care about Rose, then I should write about this.”
She was determined to tell not just Rose’s story but those of the muses and partners of Rodin’s contemporaries, the painters Paul Cézanne and Claude Monet. She did that in her 2008 book, “Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin,” foregrounding the lives of the women who were so integral to the success of the artists.
The late 19th century was a pivotal point in art history, as artists were moving away from depicting historical and religious themes in favor of capturing scenes from everyday life. “These women weren’t just models,” Ms. Butler wrote. “They brought a whole spectrum of feelings with them, giving their husbands’ art emotional texture and substance.”
Ms. Butler died on Nov. 28 at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. She was 93.
Her death, after a short illness, was announced by Nancy Stieber, a friend and colleague.
“The Shape of Genius” was “the fundamental biography of Rodin,” said June Hargrove, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and the leading expert on the sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, for whom Rodin worked off and on for nearly two decades.
“It was the first to integrate the life of the artist within the context of France at the end of the 19th century,” Ms. Hargrove added. “It’s a classic, a touchstone — you cannot do Rodin studies without having read it.”
And Ms. Butler, she said, “was the first scholar to consider the role of Rose Beuret, his lifelong companion, as well as other women around ‘the great man.’”
Ms. Butler was the author of several books on Rodin before she published “Rodin: The Shape of Genius,” a project for which she immersed herself in the sculptor’s vast archive at the Musée Rodin for two decades. He had donated his papers and books — a staggering collection of some 60,000 documents, including letters, notebooks, diaries, ledgers, bills and press clippings — to the French state in 1916.
Reviewers were either confounded by Ms. Butler’s exhaustive research or in awe of it.
Anthony Lane, writing in The Independent, called the book “indigestible.” The art historian Michael Peppiatt wrote in The New York Times Book Review that the “wealth of material on hand seems to have sapped any original exploration of Rodin’s inner life.” He also said he thought that Ms. Butler gave Rodin too much of a pass for his treatment of the many women in his life. (Rose suffered through his affairs, staying with him for half a century, although he did not marry her until a few weeks before her death in 1917, and never recognized their son, Auguste-Eugene Beuret, born in 1866.) But Fiona MacCarthy, the British biographer and critic, writing in The Observer, declared the book “so professional” that “Crotches, female” had its own index entry.
“Genius in the 1990s is not simply out of fashion, it is almost incomprehensible,” Ms. MacCarthy wrote. “Ruth Butler performs a great feat in her depictions of Rodin’s stubborn belief in his own genius, which he related to the heroic destiny of late-19th-century France. He emerges as a grizzled, tongue-tied, monolithic figure like his own sculpture of Balzac, hugely lonely, poised painfully between la volupté and la douleur.”
Ruth Butler was born on Oct. 7, 1931, in Buffalo to Hermine (Hansen) Butler and George Butler and grew up there and in Decatur, Ill. Her father made yard signs and other objects at home and later worked as a purchasing agent for a manufacturer of automobile parts.
Ms. Butler attended Western Reserve University, now Case Western Reserve University, and the Cleveland Institute of Art, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953. She went on to attend the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where she studied with H.W. Janson, who would later write the ubiquitous college text “History of Art.”
It was Mr. Janson’s example that led her to pursue the then-unfashionable subject of 19th-century sculpture, and in 1957 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in Paris. There she researched her Ph.D. thesis on the early work of Rodin and its relationship to that of the generation of sculptors before him. She earned her doctorate in 1966.
Ms. Butler’s marriage to Maurizio Mirolli, a biologist, ended in divorce. In 1994 she married Carl Kaysen, an economics professor and foreign policy expert, who was deputy national security adviser during the Kennedy administration and negotiated the nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union in 1963. Mr. Kaysen died in 2010.
She is survived by her sister, Barbara Butler.
Ms. Butler taught at the University of Maryland, College Park; the University of Pittsburgh; and the University of Massachusetts Boston, where for a time she was the chair of the art department. She retired in 1992.
“As a teacher and a scholar, she had an important influence in opening up the study of 19th-century sculpture, a field that had been previously been neglected by art historians,” said Anne Poulet, a former director of the Frick Collection in Manhattan.
After Ms. Butler retired, she created a scholarship fund at UMass Boston to send studio art and art history students who might not otherwise be able to afford it abroad, so they could see artwork firsthand.
“Having had a wonderful education herself,” Ms. Poulet said, “she wanted students to have the same opportunities. And she made it happen.”
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