Auguste Rodin

François-Auguste-René Rodin was born in Paris on 12 November 1840 and trained at the École Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques between 1854 and 1857. He went on to become the defining sculptor of his era, reshaping what figurative sculpture could express and how it could function — as monument, as fragment, as psychological document, and as an open-ended creative laboratory. He died in Meudon on 17 November 1917, the same year the French state awarded him the Grand-Croix of the Légion d'honneur, the culmination of a sequence of national honours that had begun with the Chevalier grade in 1887, followed by Officier in 1892, Commandeur in 1903, and Grand Officier in 1910.

Rodin's reputation was built through a succession of works that each, in their own way, unsettled academic convention. The Age of Bronze, modelled between 1875 and 1877, was so naturalistically rendered that it provoked accusations of life-casting — a controversy that paradoxically confirmed the originality of his touch. St. John the Baptist Preaching, completed around 1878–1880, pushed the expressive range of the walking figure far beyond restrained academic posture. From 1880 onward, The Gates of Hell became the gravitational centre of his practice: a continuously revised monumental project drawing on Dantean themes, and the generative source from which many of his most celebrated independent works emerged. The Thinker, originally conceived as the presiding figure of that portal, was enlarged in 1904 and eventually became one of the most widely recognised sculptures in the modern world. The Three Shades, created between 1881 and 1886, used the repetition and rotation of a single figure to build a spatial and architectural presence at the threshold of that same composition. The Kiss, conceived in the 1880s with a major marble version completed by 1889 — now held at Tate, London — transformed an episode from Dante's Inferno into an autonomous image of erotic intimacy that extended Rodin's reputation well beyond France. The Burghers of Calais, developed between 1884 and 1895, rejected the conventions of civic heroism entirely, presenting six psychologically individualized figures weighted with collective suffering rather than triumphant resolve; casts are held at the Musée Rodin, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Victoria Tower Gardens in London, among other institutions. The Monument to Balzac, completed between 1891 and 1898, provoked one of the defining controversies of modern French sculpture through its abstracted, enveloping form, and is now understood as a decisive precursor to modernist approaches to portraiture and the public monument. Later works such as The Walking Man, The Hand of God, The Cathedral, and the Monument to Victor Hugo continued to explore fragmentation, gesture, and the transformation of anatomy into symbol and structure.

Rodin's institutional legacy is held and administered by the Musée Rodin in Paris, established through the artist's own donation of his works, archives, and rights to the French state, and serving as the principal scholarly authority on his practice. Private collectors including John Quinn, Samuel Courtauld, and Edward T. Stotesbury were among those who acquired his work during and after his lifetime, and Rodin-related holdings have appeared in collections ranging from the Berggruen Collection to the Spencer and Marjorie Hays Collection, later given to the Musée d'Orsay. In 2024, a solo exhibition, Auguste Rodin: Faces and Fables, was presented at Bowman Sculpture in London. Looking ahead, a major centennial exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris is scheduled for 2026, presenting more than 200 works; Rodin: Drawings Unbound runs at the Musée Rodin through March 2026; Rodin selon Rilke, organised by the Musée Rodin, will be presented at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda from June through November 2026; and Rodin's Hands continues at the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia through January 2027.