Auguste Rodin Museum

The Museum of the sculptor Auguste Rodin is the largest and most important collection of works of the master, as well as paintings, sculptures, documents and books related to his life, which he bequeathed to the state.

The museum is located in the center of Paris in the luxurious 18th century mansion Biron, in which Rodin lived and worked, and surrounds the mansion with a magnificent garden, which also exhibits sculptures of the creator.

Here once you could meet Henri Matisse, Jean Cocteau, Isadora Duncan - the love of the poet Yesenin, Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet who served somewhat earlier as Rodin's secretary and opened this place for him.

The museum was established during the life of the sculptor on December 22, 1916 and opened to the public after his death in 1919, thanks to Rodin, the mansion was saved from demolition.

The collection includes 6,600 sculptures, 8,000 drawings, 8,000 old photographs and 7,000 art objects.

The Rodin Museum contains most of the sculptor’s significant creations, including The Thinker, The Kiss, Citizens of Calais and The Gates of Hell. The museum has a hall dedicated to the works of his student and beloved woman Camilla Claudel. As well as Rodin’s personal collection from works of art from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the Far East and paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Rodin’s work is at the intersection of realism, romanticism, impressionism and symbolism. Rodin achieved masterly skill in conveying the movement and emotional state of his heroes by artistic means and in depicting the human body.

Rodin was inspired by the bronze gates of the Florentine baptistery Lorenzo Ghiberti, drew ideas for plots from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and images of portals of Gothic cathedrals.

The main motive throughout Rodin’s career was the image of the human body in motion. In an effort to convey movement, Rodin considered the future sculpture not as a static object, but as a center of moving masses, so in the design of the sculpture, he had a special place in the torso as a semantic center of movement.

One day an Italian peasant came to Rodin to pose. The peasant had a beautiful physique, and especially Rodin was impressed by his movements when walking. Rodin wanted to depict movement in such a way that both legs of the sculpture stood firmly on the ground and the weight was distributed between them. So there were two works: “Walking” and “John the Baptist”, because the figure of the model caused Rodin spontaneous association with John the Baptist, As Rodin himself wrote: “I immediately thought about John the Baptist, in other words, about the divinely inspired child of nature...” Both sculptures are now part of the museum collection.

• Tour guide services, additional entrance tickets to the museum are paid.