There are some reputations in the art world that are beyond dispute. These
   artists' influence is so seminal, their accomplishments so signal, that,
   even in the act of rejecting them, their critics reiterate their
   importance. Among these titans is the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. While
   still attracting controversy a century later, Rodin's work is so central
   to Western art that only Michelangelo is better known as a sculptor, and
   every sculptor since has had to struggle to escape from being eclipsed
   beneath his formidable shadow. Amazingly, he seemed to appear out of
   nowhere, with nothing in his background or birth to indicate that a genius
   had arrived in the streets of Paris.

   Auguste Rodin was born on November 12, 1840, the only son of a minor
   police official and his wife. As a young boy, he performed poorly in
   school, possibly because of his near-sightedness, but quickly developed an
   interest in art. This led his father to enroll him at the
   government-supported Ecole Speciale de Dessin et de Mathematiques, a
   training institution for artisans and industrial designers. Though like
   other aspiring artists, Auguste longed to attend the prestigious Ecole des
   Beaux-Arts, he failed its entrance examination three times. Oddly enough,
   while he passed the drawing part of the exam, he consistently failed the
   sculpting portion. However, this may well have been a blessing in
   disguise; his friend and fellow sculptor Jules Dalou later said, "That
   Rodin, he was the lucky one, he never attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts!"

   Rodin was able to obtain lessons with the great master, Antoine-Louis
   Barye, but later admitted that Barye was so unassuming that Rodin failed
   to realize what a great privilege it was to study with him and squandered
   his opportunity. Auguste's artistic future was further compromised when,
   in an apparent emotional response to his older sister Marie's sudden death
   shortly after joining a convent, he abruptly entered a monastery. The bust
   he modeled of the order's founder convinced them both that his vocation
   was artistic rather than religious, however, and he left after only a few
   months.

   He worked as an artisan for various ornament makers and decorative
   sculptors doing architectural ornamentation for years while he struggled
   to sculpt on his own time and money. His first significant piece, Man
   with a Broken Nose, presented initially as a plaster mask, was
   rejected by the Paris Salon in 1864. Deciding his luck might be better
   with a full-sized sculpture, Rodin hired a young model, Rose Beuret, who
   would be his companion for the remainder of her life and bear his only
   child. Unfortunately, this first statue was damaged in a move and later
   destroyed.

   In 1870, in response to the Franco-Prussian War, Rodin moved to Belgium
   where he worked in the atelier of the prominent sculptor Albert-Ernest
   Carrier-Belleuse. Rodin said later that the 6 years he spent in Brussels
   were a time of immense growth for him as a sculptor. He began making money
   with his own sculpture while continuing to support himself with
   architectural decoration. Near the end of that time, he took a trip to
   Italy where his discovery of the works of Michelangelo also became a major
   influence on his future work. Returning to Paris in 1876, he began work on
   a life-size sculpture of a nude male eventually called Age of
   Bronze. While he had already exhibited in the Salon in 1875, Age of
   Bronze, exhibited in 1877, was his first piece to attract notice -
   unfortunately, the wrong kind. The piece was so realistic that critics
   accused him of casting from life. Fortunately, a number of his fellow
   sculptors came to his defense and convinced M. Turquet, the head of the
   Ministry of Art, to purchase the piece for the state. Rodin went on to
   sculpt another full figure, St. John the Baptist, which would
   become enormously influential on modern art after he removed the head and
   arms and titled it The Walking Man.

   Still unable to support himself as a sculptor, Rodin continued to do
   decorative work, at one point designing vases for the national porcelain
   factory at Sevres. Then, through his acquaintance with Turquet, Rodin
   received the commission to create a pair of bronze doors for a planned
   museum of decorative arts. Though the museum was never built, the doors
   became Rodin's famous The Gates of Hell, a massive piece of
   sculpture based on Dante's Inferno  and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs
   du Mal. At that time, Rodin was embarking on a tempestuous
   relationship with sculptor Camille Claudel, at one time a student of his,
   and this provided the impetus for much of the great work that came out of
   his atelier over the following decade. Many of his most famous sculptures
   derived from work done on The Gates, including Eternal
   Springtime, Eve, The Fallen Caryatid Beneath Her Stone,
   The Kiss, and The Thinker. During that exceptionally
   fruitful period, Rodin would also work on the commissions for The
   Burghers of Calais, two monuments to Victor Hugo, and his monumental
   and most innovative work, Balzac. The Balzac  was a
   revelation, but sparked so much controversy that it ended Rodin's desire
   to take on public monuments. A visiting Oscar Wilde wrote about the piece:
   "The leonine head of a fallen angel, with a dressing gown. The head is
   gorgeous, the dressing gown an entirely unshaped cone of white plaster.
   People howl with rage over it."

   For most of the rest of his life, Rodin would focus on running his
   ateliers and modeling commissioned portrait busts, including those of such
   well-known figures as George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Pulitzer, Lady
   Sackville-West, Isadora Duncan, and Gustav Mahler. In 1917, with World War
   I raging, a stroke-ridden Rodin finally married his faithful Rose Beuret,
   who died of pneumonia only 3 weeks later. In November of the same year,
   Rodin himself succumbed to illness. The couple were buried together in a
   vault in the garden of their villa at Meudon beneath a copy of The
   Thinker.

   Everl Adair, Director of Research and Rare Collections