‘Your favourite virtue?’ ‘I don’t have any: they are all boring,’ wrote the 21-year-old Camille Claudel in a Victorian album belonging to an English friend in 1886. The remark perfectly matches the photograph of the aspiring sculptor taken two years earlier by César: childlike, sullen, attitudinous, beautiful.

Claudel was in England on a break from working in Auguste Rodin’s studio, where she had been taken on as an assistant in 1884.