Biography of Auguste Rodin

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The most influential sculptor of the late nineteenth century, Rodin was a late starter. Born in Paris, he received an initial art training at the Ecole Spécials de Dessin et de Mathématiques. Failing the entrance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he worked as a craftsman in porcelain factories and workshops until the early 1880s. Determined to be a sculptor, he supplemented his technical. training by studying in museums and became interested in Puget and Michelangelo. In 1874-5, he visited Italy, where he was strongly affected by the spiritual intensity and the powerful modelling of Michaelangelo's work.

Its impact was demonstrated in his Age of Bronze, which led to his first showing at the Paris Salon in 1877. However, the lifelike quality of his figure provoked accusations of him having used life-casts, and the work received no genuine recognition until it was shown in London in 1884.

In 1880, Rodin began his most ambitious project, The Gate of Hell, which was commissioned as a doorway for the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs. At his death in 1917, it was still unfinished, but its numerous figures provided him with a vast stock of ideas, which he would develop separately into independent works, such as The Thinker (1880) and The Kiss (1886).

Wilde was a great admirer of Rodin. He was in a minority in praising Rodin's controversial portrait of Balzac in 1891-8: 'The head is gorgeous, the dressing-gown is an entirely unshaped cone of white plaster. People howl with rage over it'. In the last year of his life, Wilde visited Rodin's pavilion at the Exposition Universelle. Shown round the exhibition by Rodin himself, Wilde was entranced by 'all his great dreams in marble' and described the sculptor as 'the greatest poet in France'.

Rodin had close contacts with the English art world: he was Whistler's friend and was represented by William Rothenstein and Robert Ross's Carfax Gallery in London. His last important monument commission was that for Whistler, which was planned to be erected at the Chelsea Embankment near the former Whistler house. It never materialised as a monument, but a small-scale study shows Rodin's idea of a 'muse' for the Whistler monument. The model was Gwen John, the elder sister of Augustus John's and Rodin's mistress. Briefly, John had also been Whistler's student in Paris.