Auguste Rodin Timeline

Auguste Rodin 39

1840 Auguste Rodin born in Paris François-Auguste-René Rodin is born on 12 November 1840 in the rue de l'Arbalète in Paris, to Jean-Baptiste Rodin, a clerk, and Marie Cheffer. The family is lower-middle-class and not artistic. Auguste is a poor student — short-sighted and inattentive in class — but shows an early gift for drawing. His sister Marie, two years older, is his closest companion in childhood; her death in 1862 from a fever devastates him and briefly drives him into a religious community.
1843 – 1847 Boarding school at Beauvais Sent away at three, a poor student Rodin was severely short-sighted and struggled with reading and arithmetic. He returned to Paris barely literate and drawing constantly.
1854 – 1857 Petite École — first artistic training Unable to gain admission to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, Rodin enters the École Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques — known as the Petite École — where he studies drawing and decorative arts from 1854 to 1857. He discovers sculpture almost by accident, working with clay and feeling an immediate affinity for three-dimensional form. His talent is obvious to his teachers, who encourage him to pursue sculpture seriously. The Petite École gives Rodin technical foundations but not the academic credentials of the Beaux-Arts.
1857 – 1864 Three rejections by the École des Beaux-Arts Rodin applies to the École des Beaux-Arts — the official French art academy and the only path to official recognition — three times between 1857 and 1859 and is rejected each time. The rejections are humiliating and consequential: they exclude him from the official exhibition system (the Salon), government commissions and the network of patrons that sustains academic sculptors. They also, inadvertently, free him from academic conventions. Rodin spends the next decade working as a decorative craftsman to survive while developing his own approach to sculpture.
1862 – 1863 Death of Auguste Rodin's sister Marie — enters religious community Rodin's beloved sister Marie dies of fever in 1862, aged 25. Devastated, Rodin enters the Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament — a religious community in Paris — intending to take holy orders. The community's founder, Father Pierre-Julien Eymard, quickly recognises that Rodin's vocation is artistic rather than religious and encourages him to leave. Eymard sits for a portrait bust, which Rodin executes with remarkable skill. Rodin returns to the world of art, but the experience of grief and spiritual searching leaves permanent traces in his work.
1864 Meets Rose Beuret — companion for life Rodin meets Rose Beuret — a young seamstress from Champagne — in 1864. She becomes his life companion, model, housekeeper and eventually (in 1917, weeks before both their deaths) his wife. Rose accepts a relationship of extraordinary inequality: Rodin is repeatedly unfaithful, sometimes publicly; she endures decades of neglect and humiliation. Yet she remains devoted, managing his household and protecting his work. She dies on 14 February 1917, two weeks after their wedding and nine months before Rodin himself.
1864 – 1871 Working for Carrier-Belleuse — decorative sculpture To survive, Rodin works as an ornamental sculptor and craftsman for the successful commercial sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, producing decorative figures, architectural ornaments and objets d'art that bear Carrier-Belleuse's name. The work is artistically unsatisfying but technically demanding — it forces Rodin to work quickly, precisely and in many different styles. He learns the commercial reality of sculpture: most sculptors survive by making decorative work, not masterpieces. The experience sharpens his technical skill while frustrating his artistic ambitions.
1866 His son is born Auguste-Eugène Beuret — never formally acknowledged Rodin did not give the boy his name. The relationship stayed distant for the whole of both their lives.
1870 – 1871 Franco-Prussian War — Rodin serves briefly The Franco-Prussian War interrupts Rodin's career in 1870. He is conscripted into the National Guard but discharged after a few months due to his poor eyesight. The war and the subsequent Paris Commune of 1871 devastate the Parisian art world. Rodin follows Carrier-Belleuse to Brussels, where the commercial sculptor has secured commissions for the new Brussels Bourse. Rodin spends six years in Belgium — a period of hard work, artistic development and financial struggle.
1871 – 1877 The Brussels years Architectural decoration with Van Rasbourgh Six years producing ornament for buildings and stock exchanges under someone else's name — the last stretch of his life as an anonymous craftsman.
1875 – 1876 Journey to Italy — the revelation of Michelangelo Rodin travels to Italy in 1875–1876, spending time in Florence, Rome and Naples studying classical antiquity and Renaissance sculpture — particularly Michelangelo. The experience is transformative. Rodin writes to Rose: 'I have seen the Medici tombs. I am overwhelmed.' Michelangelo's figures — the tension between mass and movement, the unfinished surfaces, the psychological intensity — give Rodin the key to his own style. He begins to understand that sculpture's power comes not from smooth perfection but from the expression of inner life through surface and form.
1877 The Age of Bronze — accused of casting from life Rodin exhibits 'The Age of Bronze' at the Paris Salon of 1877 — a life-size male figure of such anatomical precision that critics accuse him of casting directly from a living model rather than sculpting from observation. The accusation is the opposite of intended praise: it means Rodin has no artistic merit, merely technical trickery. Rodin is devastated and angry. He commissions photographs of his working process and gathers testimony from the Belgian soldiers who had modelled for him. The controversy is eventually resolved in his favour — and the realism it condemned becomes his trademark.
1880 A studio at the Dépôt des Marbres State patronage at last Along with the Gates commission came a government workshop. At forty, Rodin finally had space, marble and assistants.
1880 The Gates of Hell commissioned The French government commissions Rodin to create a monumental bronze portal for a planned decorative arts museum in Paris in 1880 — inspired by Dante's Inferno and Ghiberti's 'Gates of Paradise.' Rodin works on the Gates of Hell for the rest of his life, never considering them finished. They become a laboratory from which he extracts some of his greatest independent works: The Thinker, The Kiss, The Three Shades, Ugolino. The museum is never built, but the Gates generate a lifetime of sculpture. Rodin's method of recycling and recombining figures — treating the human body as a modular element — originates here.
1882 Camille Claudel — the great love and tragedy Rodin takes on Camille Claudel as a student and assistant in 1882. She is 18; he is 42. She is extraordinarily talented — some critics consider her Rodin's equal or superior in sculptural imagination — and becomes his model, muse, lover and collaborator for the next fifteen years. The relationship is passionate and destructive: Rodin refuses to leave Rose Beuret; Claudel endures years of waiting before breaking definitively with him around 1898. She eventually suffers a mental breakdown and spends the last thirty years of her life in an asylum, her work largely unrecognised until after her death.
1882 The Thinker — the poet of Hell Rodin creates The Thinker in 1880–1882 as the central figure above the Gates of Hell — originally called 'The Poet,' representing Dante contemplating his great work. The figure sits hunched in intense concentration, chin on fist, muscles tense with thought rather than action. Rodin enlarges it to monumental scale in 1902; over 28 full-size bronze casts are eventually made. It becomes the most recognised sculpture in the world — so ubiquitous that it is frequently used as a symbol of thought, philosophy, creativity and introspection in contexts Rodin never imagined.
1883 Camille Claudel enters the studio Pupil, model, collaborator She was nineteen and already an accomplished sculptor. She worked on the hands and feet of the Burghers and the Gates alongside him.
1884 – 1889 The Burghers of Calais The city of Calais commissions Rodin in 1884 to create a monument commemorating six burghers who offered their lives to Edward III of England in 1347 to save the city from destruction. Rodin's solution is revolutionary: instead of a conventional heroic monument with figures posed on a high plinth, he places six life-size figures at ground level, each experiencing a different psychological response to imminent death — fear, resignation, dignity, despair. The Burghers of Calais is one of the first truly modern public sculptures: it refuses the rhetoric of heroism and shows human beings in all their vulnerable complexity.
1885 Danaïd Marble — the back as the whole subject A figure collapsed forward with her face hidden, the spine and hair carved in one continuous flow out of rough stone.
1886 The Kiss Rodin creates The Kiss around 1882–1886, originally as a figure for the Gates of Hell representing Paolo and Francesca from Dante's Inferno — two adulterous lovers damned for eternity. The marble version, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1887, is immediately controversial for its explicit sensuality: the two figures entwined in their embrace are among the most openly erotic works in Western sculpture. Rodin eventually removes the figures from the Gates — he feels they are too happy and self-contained for a work about damnation. The Kiss becomes one of the most reproduced sculptures in history.
1889 Joint exhibition with Monet Galerie Georges Petit Thirty-six sculptures beside seventy paintings. It established Rodin in the public mind as the sculptural equal of the Impressionists.
1891 – 1898 Balzac — the most controversial sculpture of the 19th century The Société des Gens de Lettres commissions Rodin in 1891 to create a monument to Honoré de Balzac. Rodin spends seven years in preparation — studying portraits, visiting Balzac's birthplace, having a fat tailor make him a suit to Balzac's measurements. The final figure, exhibited in 1898, is a massive, simplified, rough-surfaced form — Balzac in his dressing gown, head thrown back, the body reduced to an almost abstract mass of creative energy. The commission rejects it as 'a shapeless lump.' Rodin withdraws it and it stands in his garden for decades. It is now considered his greatest work.
1893 Camille Claudel breaks with him After ten years He would not leave Rose Beuret. Claudel ended the relationship, and her own work and mental health deteriorated in the years that followed.
1898 The Balzac is rejected He refuses to alter it and keeps the plaster The writers' society that commissioned it called the figure a shapeless mass. Rodin returned the fee and took the sculpture home to Meudon, where it stood in his garden until he died.
1900 Pavilion of Alma — the retrospective that made him famous During the 1900 Paris World's Fair, Rodin rents space near the official exhibition and stages a massive solo retrospective — 168 sculptures — in a purpose-built Pavilion de l'Alma. The exhibition is a sensation: international visitors flood in; critics from across Europe write about him; collectors vie for his work. At 60, Rodin becomes the most famous living sculptor in the world. The 1900 retrospective is the watershed: before it, Rodin is controversial and relatively obscure outside France; after it, he is universally celebrated.
1900 The pavilion makes him rich Around two hundred thousand francs Rodin financed his own pavilion outside the Exposition Universelle and it paid for itself many times over. He bought property and hired assistants on the proceeds.
1900 – 1917 Villa des Brillants — atelier at Meudon From 1895 Rodin lives and works at the Villa des Brillants in Meudon, south of Paris — a country house with gardens where he installs his plaster models and works outdoors. Meudon becomes a place of pilgrimage: artists, writers, collectors and heads of state visit. Rodin receives George Bernard Shaw, Gustav Mahler, Rainer Maria Rilke (who serves as his secretary for a year), Henry James, Edward VII of England and the King of Sweden. Rilke's experience as Rodin's secretary produces his famous 'Letters to a Young Poet' and a monograph on Rodin that is one of the finest pieces of art criticism in any language.
1902 Rainer Maria Rilke — secretary and biographer Rainer Maria Rilke, the German-language poet then largely unknown, arrives at Meudon in 1902 to write a monograph on Rodin. He stays for months, working as Rodin's secretary and absorbing his philosophy of work. Rodin's advice to Rilke — 'Il faut travailler, toujours travailler' (One must work, always work) — shapes Rilke's artistic practice for the rest of his life. Rilke's 'Auguste Rodin' (1903) is the most eloquent account of Rodin's sculpture ever written. The relationship between the greatest sculptor and one of the greatest poets of their era is one of the remarkable encounters in art history.
1903 Succeeds Whistler as president International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers By now the most famous living sculptor in the world, elected to lead the body Whistler had headed until his death.
1906 The Cambodian dancers Drawings made in a single week Royal dancers performed in Paris and Rodin followed them to Marseille, working in pencil and wash. He said they had made him see antiquity again.
1906 The Walking Man — the torso as complete work Rodin exhibits 'The Walking Man' in 1907 — a headless, armless striding figure that is among the most radical sculptures of the era. The figure has no head and no arms, yet it is not a fragment — Rodin intends it to be complete. The torso's muscular tension and forward momentum are sufficient to convey the entire force of human movement. 'The Walking Man' anticipates abstract sculpture by decades and demonstrates Rodin's willingness to challenge the assumption that a human figure must be complete to be expressive.
1908 Hôtel Biron — future Musée Rodin Rodin rents studio space at the Hôtel Biron — an 18th-century mansion in the 7th arrondissement of Paris — from 1908. Other residents include the poet Rilke, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the painter Henri Matisse. When the French government takes over the building, Rodin negotiates a deal: he will donate his entire estate — all his sculptures, drawings, collection and the Hôtel Biron itself — to the French state in exchange for the right to live there until his death. The Hôtel Biron becomes the Musée Rodin after his death in 1917, one of the great sculpture museums in the world.
1912 A Rodin wing opens at the Metropolitan New York American collectors had been buying him for years. The dedicated galleries confirmed his standing outside Europe.
1913 Camille Claudel is committed She spends thirty years in asylums Institutionalised by her family days after her father's death, against the recommendation of her doctors. She never sculpted again and was buried in a communal grave.
1914 – 1917 World War I — final years The outbreak of World War I in 1914 devastates Rodin, then 74. Many of his friends and patrons die or flee Paris; the art world contracts; his own health declines. He travels to England and Rome but is increasingly frail. His relationship with women — a lifelong pattern of intense passion followed by abandonment — culminates in a series of late affairs with much younger women that drain him financially and emotionally. His friends fear he is being exploited. In the final years, Rodin produces almost no new sculpture but continues to draw and to receive visitors.
1916 Donates everything to France Three deeds of gift in one year Rodin gave the state his sculptures, drawings, archive and antiquities collection, on condition the Hôtel Biron become a museum of his work.
1917 Rose Beuret dies Two weeks after the wedding They had been together fifty-three years and married in January. She died in February. Rodin followed in November.
1917 Marries Rose Beuret — both die within weeks In January 1917, with both seriously ill, Rodin finally marries Rose Beuret — his companion of 53 years. She dies on 14 February 1917, two weeks after their wedding. Rodin, who has suffered a series of strokes, survives her by nine months. He dies on 17 November 1917 at Meudon, aged 77, from congestion of the lungs. He is buried beside Rose in the garden of the Villa des Brillants at Meudon, beneath a cast of The Thinker. The inscription on the base reads: 'Au grand créateur, à l'artiste inspiré' — To the great creator, to the inspired artist.
1919 – 1920 Legacy — the Musée Rodin and worldwide casts The Musée Rodin opens in the Hôtel Biron in Paris in 1919 — two years after Rodin's death — and the Villa des Brillants at Meudon becomes an annexe. Together they hold the world's largest collection of Rodin's work. Under Rodin's bequest, the Musée Rodin holds the rights to cast authorised bronze editions of his plaster models; twelve authorised casts of each major work have been made. The Thinker stands outside dozens of museums, universities and public buildings worldwide. Rodin's influence on 20th-century sculpture — Brancusi, Giacometti, Henry Moore — is immeasurable. He is the pivot between classical and modern sculpture.