« It’s again to Georges Limbour that we owe one of the very first descriptions of this sculpture, that he saw during one of his visits to the workshop: « When we were about to leave, Germaine Richier […] came with the desire to show us an object of about one meter and forty centimeters high, wrapped in a damp cloth. She unraveled it, because the strip of cloth was, in this case, employed in an opposite usage to that of the Egyptians : instead of wrapping the body after its death, it was before its birth that it protected it. It was thus an unfinished work: a forest-man, made out of a wisely chosen tree branch, of clay, of wire, and I think that there was still some moss, yes, at least on the branch. Undoubtedly, these different natures were only provisional, drawn from the artist’s immediate inspiration, and assembled unchanged, in the impulse of inspiration, destined to be later erased within the plaster.” One year later, in 1948, during a visit of the exhibition dedicated to Germaine Richier by the Maeght gallery, Georges Limbour was given the opportunity to see the bronze version of the sculpture : “… here is a forest-man, which is in bronze. Through its shapes, we can guess that this being […] was primitively composed of diverse and disparate substances, like clay and vegetables. We can distinctively see, for instance, that its right arm is a cast of a knotty tree branch, suggesting the shape of an arm and a shoulder. The process can thus be related to what is called in painting a collage, with the difference that in this case, the object was transmuted, changed types, passing from wood to bronze, and through this, was inherently embedded into the unity of the whole…” If the Forest-man was conceived out of vegetables collected in the Valais, The Forest came as the opportunity for Germaine Richier to retrieve her Provencal roots, putting her own family in charge of collecting the material, as it shows in a letter sent to her mother, in 1946, later found by Françoise Guiter : “I would like Kikou [her brother René] to send me without delay the branches I asked him for, extremely knotty like nervous arms. […] The olive tree seems to me as the most appropriate one, but maybe at La Palud we can find something original and authentic.” »
Translation of F. Guiter, excerpt from « Germaine Richier, Rétrospective », exh.cat., Saint-Paul : Fondation Maeght, 1996, p. 58