Auguste Rodin and Geoges Rouault

Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin was born on November 12, 1840 as Francois Auguste Rene Rodin. He was born into a working class family in Paris. Despite the talent evident in his portrait of the local priest who helped him discover his vocation, Rodin was denied admission to the Beaux Arts academy. He was accepted, however, at a trade school for decorative sculpture, and later moved to Belgium to work in a studio that produced that kind of work. One of his early works, The Age of Bronze, created during his years in Belgium, looked so realistic that the sculptor was accused of surmoulage. (taking plaster moulds from the live model).

Rodin struggled to clear his name and in 1880 was awarded the commission to create a portal for the planned Museum of Decorative Arts. Although the museum was never built, Rodin worked for 37 years on this monumental sculptural group, The Gates of Hell, depicting scenes from Dante’s Inferno in high relief. Many of his best-known sculptures, like The Thinker, (representing the poet Dante), The Three Shades, and The Kiss were designed as figures for this monumental landscape of eternal passion and punishment, and only later presented as works in their own right.

Rodin, commissioned to create a Monument to Victor Hugo in the 1890s, dealt extensively with the subject of artist and muse, reflecting the various aspects of his stormy and complex relationship with Claudel in The Poet and Love, The Genius and Pity, The Sculptor and his Muse. Like many of Rodin's public commissions, the Mounument to Victor Hugo met resistance because it did not fit conventional expectations. The 1897 plaster model was finally cast in bronze in 1964.

As France's best known artist, he had a large staff of pupils, craftsmen, and stone cutters working for him. He created a number of society portrait busts, especially for wealthy American collectors, and began presenting fragmentary sculptures, which in his opinion contained the essence of his artistic statement, like Meditation without Arms, Iris, Messenger of the Gods or The Walking Man

Auguste Rodin died on November, 1917. A cast of The Thinker was placed next to his tomb in Meudon, France.

Geoges Rouault

Rouault was born 1871 in Paris into a poor family. His mother taught him to love arts. He was Catholic, but he went to a Protestant school. At the age of 14, in 1885, Rouault embarked on an apprenticeship as a glass painter and restorer, which finished in 1890. According to some critics, his apprenticeship as a glass painter impressed on