Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin was born in Paris on 12 November 1840. He was rejected more than once by the École des Beaux-Arts and earned his living for years as a craftsman in other sculptors’ studios. His early independent figures, with their rough surfaces and intense expressions, were sometimes accused of being cast from life; they were not, but they did break with the smoother official style of the day. Among his major works are The Gates of Hell, from which The Thinker and The Kiss were developed, a monument to Balzac, and the Monument to the Burghers of Calais. For Calais he modeled the six citizens who, in 1347, offered themselves as hostages to end a siege, and he showed them not as a single triumphant hero but as six men walking forward together, each bearing the cost in his own way. The final version was completed in 1889 and unveiled in Calais on 3 June 1895. Rodin died at Meudon on 17 November 1917. The Musée Rodin in Paris holds his plaster of the monument and many of the studies.