François-Auguste-René Rodin was born in Paris on the 12th of November 1840. By the time he was a teenager Rodin had developed a talent for art and he began to study the subject. He applied 3 times to enter the École des Beaux-Arts school in Paris but was rejected on each occasion. Instead he began work as a bricklayer.
Twenty years later Rodin once again tried his artistic hand. He had his first exhibition in 1878 when he was nearly 40 years old and within a few years he had gained a reputation as a skilled sculptor.
Rodin went on to create many more famous works before his death on the 17th of November 1917 at the age of 77. He is now regarded as the pioneer of modern sculpture.
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Belgian solider Auguste Neyt, a man who would have had the experience of fighting, was used as the model for The Age of Bronze. The figure suggests heroism, but also anguish - two very different aspects of war
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Rodin is said to have made this figure of John the Baptist on a larger scale as a response to critics of The Age of Bronze who had suggested that he had used casts on that work. The size of this piece proved them wrong
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English king Edward III laid siege to the city which was forced to surrender. Edward demanded that six of Calais' leaders would surrender themselves to him for execution. Five of the city's burghers volunteered and they are the figures commemorated in the sculpture.
Although the burghers expected to be killed, they were in fact spared. There were 12 casts made of the work, one of which sits, ironically, in Victoria Tower Gardens, London - the city which was home to Edward III |
Francesca was a real woman who lived in the 13th century in Italy. She and her husband's brother fell in love. They were discovered together by her husband who killed them both.
In Dante's Inferno Francesca and her lover are condemned to the second circle of hell which is reserved for the lustful. Here an eternal whirlwind blows, sweeping them forever through the air - just as they allowed themselves to be swept away by their desire |
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After this rejection Rodin's contemporaries such as Paul Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and Claude Monet, signed a petition, but it made no difference. Later critics have liked the work, with art historian Kenneth Clark calling it "the greatest piece of sculpture of the 19th Century, perhaps, indeed, the greatest since Michelangelo"
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On the 3rd of June 1962, 106 Atlanta arts patrons died in an aeroplane accident at Orly Airport in Paris. They were on a museum-sponsored trip at the time. To honour those who died the French government donated The Shade to the museum
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In Rodin's own words, "Without knowing why, I saw my model changing. I modified my contours, naively following the successive transformations of ever-amplifying forms. One day, I learned that she was pregnant; then I understood... It certainly hadn't occurred to me to take a pregnant woman as a model for Eve; an accident - happy for me - gave her to me and it aided the character of the figure singularly. But soon, becoming more sensitive, my model found the studio too cold; she came less frequently, then not at all. That is why my Eve is unfinished"
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A small version of The Thinker was created as a part of the larger work The Gates of Hell. Larger versions were made to be displayed on their own and now more than 20 bronze casts exist in cities throughout the world
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By omitting the arms and head Rodin forces our attention onto the movement of the body. The piece has been compared to the rough sketches of the Impressionist painters - displaying movement and feeling rather than realism
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The Gates of Hell is truly colossal. It has a height of 6m (20ft), a width of 4m (13ft) and a depth of 1m (3ft). There are a total of 180 individual figures on the piece, some of whom (such as The Shade and The Thinker) are reproduced elsewhere as individual pieces.
Rodin worked on and off on this piece until his death in 1917 |