Rodin, (Fran�ois) Auguste (Ren�) 1840-1917
French sculptor

Rodin was born in Paris, the son of a clerk. He made three unsuccessful attempts to enter the �cole des Beaux-Arts, and from 1864 (the year in which he produced his first great work, L'Homme au nez cass�, 'The Man with the Broken Nose') until 1875 he worked in Paris and Brussels under the sculptors Antoine Barye, and Carrier-Belleuse, and with Van Rasbourg, with whom he collaborated in some of the decorations for the Brussels Bourse.

In 1875 he travelled in Italy, studying the work of Donatello, Michelangelo and others, and in 1877 made a tour of the French cathedrals (he published Les Cath�drales de la France much later, in 1914). The Italian masters and the Gothic cathedrals both influenced Rodin's work considerably, as did his interest in the ancient Greeks, but the greatest influence on him was the current trend of Romanticism. In 1877 he exhibited anonymously at the Paris Salon L'�ge d'airain ('The Age of Bronze'), which aroused controversy because of its realism; indeed, the sculptor was accused of taking the cast from a living man. In 1879 he exhibited the more highly developed Saint Jean Baptiste ('St John the Baptist').

In 1880 he was commissioned by the government to produce the Porte de l'enfer ('The Gate of Hell'), inspired by Dante's Inferno, for the Mus�e des Arts D�coratifs, and during the next 30 years he was primarily engaged on the 186 figures for these bronze doors. It was never completed, but many of his best-known works were originally conceived as part of the design of the doors, among them Le Baiser (1898, 'The Kiss') and Le Penseur (1904, 'The Thinker'). From 1886 to 1895 he worked on Les Bourgeois de Calais ('The Burghers of Calais').

His statues include those of a nude Victor Hugo (1897) and Honor� de Balzac in a dressing gown (1898), the latter being refused recognition by the Societ� des Gens de Lettres who had commissioned it; and among his portrait busts are those of Madame Rodin, Bastien-Lepage, Puvis de Chavannes, Victor Hugo and George Bernard Shaw.

His works are represented in the Mus�e Rodin, Paris, in the Rodin Museum, Philadelphia, and in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where there is a collection of his bronzes which he presented to the British nation in 1914.

Bibliography: Ionel Jianou, Rodin (1970); Robert Descharnes and J F Chabrun, Auguste Rodin (1967); Albert Edward Elson, Auguste Rodin: Readings on His Life and Works (1965).