Francois-Auguste-Rene Rodin was born on November 12, 1840, in Paris, into a working-class family. He was a mediocre student academically but showed early artistic talent, and after being rejected three times by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts — a failure that haunted and motivated him throughout his life — he earned his living as a craftsman and architectural ornamentalist for nearly two decades. He studied anatomy obsessively, worked in the studio of the animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, and in 1875 traveled to Italy, where the muscular dynamism of Michelangelo’s unfinished “Slaves” struck him with revelatory force. The impact was immediately visible in “The Age of Bronze” (1877), a life-size male nude so startlingly naturalistic that critics accused Rodin of having cast it directly from a living model — a scandal that, paradoxically, brought him the public attention that years of honest labor had not.
In 1880 the French government commissioned Rodin to create a pair of bronze doors for a planned Museum of Decorative Arts, a project inspired by Lorenzo Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise” in Florence. Rodin chose Dante’s “Inferno” as his subject, and “The Gates of Hell” became the obsessive, never-completed masterwork that occupied him for the remaining thirty-seven years of his life. From this seething mass of over two hundred writhing figures emerged many of his most famous independent sculptures: “The Thinker” (originally conceived as Dante brooding over the abyss), “The Kiss,” “Ugolino,” and “The Three Shades.” Rodin’s radical innovation lay in his treatment of surface: rather than smoothing his bronzes and marbles to academic perfection, he left visible the marks of his fingers in clay, the rough-hewn chisel strokes in stone, and allowed fragments — a torso without arms, a hand without a body — to stand as complete works. This emphasis on process, texture, and the expressive potential of the incomplete made him the crucial bridge between Neoclassical sculpture and the modernist experiments that followed.
Rodin’s personal life was as turbulent as his art. His long relationship with Rose Beuret, whom he married only weeks before her death in 1917, coexisted with his passionate and creatively intertwined affair with the sculptor Camille Claudel, who was his student, model, and artistic collaborator from 1883 to 1898. Claudel’s own genius contributed to several of Rodin’s major works, though the precise extent of her involvement remains debated; their relationship ended in bitterness, and Claudel spent her last thirty years confined to a psychiatric asylum. Rodin’s major public commissions — “The Burghers of Calais” (1884-1895), the monument to Balzac (1891-1898), and “The Thinker” installed before the Pantheon in 1906 — were almost invariably controversial, their unconventional realism offending conservative tastes. Yet by the time of his death on November 17, 1917, Rodin was universally recognized as the greatest sculptor since Bernini. He bequeathed his entire collection and studio to the French state, which established the Musee Rodin in the Hotel Biron in Paris, where his works continue to attract millions of visitors each year.