Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin (born November 12, 1840, Paris, France—died November 17, 1917, Meudon) was a French sculptor of sumptuous bronze and marble figures, considered by some critics to be the greatest portraitist in the history of sculpture. His The Gates of Hell, commissioned in 1880 for the future Museum of the Decorative Arts in Paris, remained unfinished at his death but nonetheless resulted in two of Rodin’s most famous images: The Thinker and The Kiss. His portraits include monumental figures of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac. Rodin’s enduring popularity is evident by the numerous posthumous casts of his sculptures that continue to be made.

Early life and work

Rodin was born into a poor family. At age 13 he entered a drawing school, where he learned drawing and modeling, and at 17 he attempted to enter the École des Beaux-Arts, but he failed the competitive examinations three times. The following year (1858), he decided to earn his living by doing decorative stonework. Traumatized by the death of his sister Marie in 1862, he considered entering the church; but in 1864 the young sculptor met Rose Beuret, a seamstress, who became his life companion, although he did not marry her until a few weeks before her death in February 1917.

Rodin had begun to work with the sculptor Albert Carrier-Belleuse when, in 1864, his first submission to the official Salon exhibition, The Man with the Broken Nose, was rejected. His early independent work included also several portrait studies of Beuret. In 1871 he went with Carrier-Belleuse to work on decorations for public monuments in Brussels. Dismissed by Carrier-Belleuse, he collaborated on the execution of decorative bronzes, and Beuret joined him in Brussels.

In 1875, at age 35, Rodin had yet to develop a personally expressive style because of the pressures of the decorative work. Italy gave him the shock that stimulated his genius. He visited Genoa, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice before returning to Brussels. The inspiration of Michelangelo and Donatello rescued him from the academicism of his working experience. Under those influences, he molded the bronze The Vanquished, his first original work, the painful expression of a vanquished energy aspiring to rebirth. It provoked scandals in the artistic circles of Brussels and again at the Paris Salon, where it was exhibited in 1877 as The Age of Bronze. The realism of the work contrasted so greatly with the statues of Rodin’s contemporaries that he was accused of having formed its mold upon a living person.

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In 1877 Rodin returned to Paris, and in 1879 his former master Carrier-Belleuse, now director of the Sèvres porcelain factory, asked him for designs. He was rejected in various competitions for monuments to be erected in London and Paris, but finally he received a commission to execute a statue for City Hall in Paris. Meanwhile, he explored his personal style in St. John the Baptist Preaching (1880). Its success and that of The Age of Bronze at the salons of Paris and Brussels in 1880 established his reputation as a sculptor at age 40.

Toward the achievement of his art

At an age when most artists already had completed a large body of work, Rodin was just beginning to affirm his personal art. He received a state commission to create a bronze door for the future Museum of Decorative Arts, a grant that provided him with two workshops and whose advance payments made him financially secure.

That bronze door was to be the great effort of Rodin’s life. Although it was commissioned for delivery in 1884, it was left unfinished at his death in 1917. It was first cast posthumously the same year. The theme of its scenes was borrowed from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and eventually it came to be called The Gates of Hell. His original conception was similar to that of the 15th-century Italian sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti in his The Gates of Paradise doors for the Baptistery in Florence. His plans were profoundly altered, however, by his visit to London in 1881 at the invitation of the painter Alphonse Legros. There Rodin saw the many Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings inspired by Dante, above all the hallucinatory works of William Blake. He transformed his plans for The Gates to ones that would reveal a universe of convulsed forms tormented by love, pain, and death. This unachieved monument was the framework out of which he created independent sculptural figures and groups, among them his famous The Thinker, originally conceived as a seated portrait of Dante for the upper part of the door. Rodin first exhibited it in 1888.

In 1884 Rodin was commissioned to create a monument for the town of Calais to commemorate the sacrifice of the burghers who gave themselves as hostages to King Edward III of England in 1347 to raise the yearlong siege of the famine-ravaged city. Rodin completed work on The Burghers of Calais within two years, but the monument was not dedicated until 1895. In 1913 a bronze casting of the Calais group was installed in the gardens of Parliament in London to commemorate the intervention of the English queen who had compelled her husband, King Edward, to show clemency to the heroes.

While the artist’s glory continued to increase, his private life was troubled by the numerous liaisons into which his unbridled sensuality plunged him. About 1885 he became the lover of one of his students, Camille Claudel, the gifted sister of the poet Paul Claudel. It proved a stormy romance beset by numerous quarrels, but it persisted until Camille’s madness brought it to a finish in 1898. Their attachment was deep and was pursued throughout the country. During the years of passion, Rodin executed sculptures of numerous couples in the throes of desire. The most sensuous of these groups was The Kiss, sometimes considered his masterpiece. The work, originally conceived as the figures of Paolo and Francesca for The Gates of Hell, was first exhibited in 1887 and exposed him to numerous scandals.