Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin was born in 1840 and died in 1917, a year before the end of World War I. He was one of the most illustrious artists of his time, and in the eyes of posterity he remains, surely, the greatest name in Western Sculpture since Michelangelo.

His style was both classic and romantic, and to his contemporaries it was also revolutionary, for although Rodin followed routine closely, he presented it exactly as he saw and experienced it, and refused to be bound by the artistic conventions of his day.

Unlike his contemporary sculptors of the 1870’s and 1880’s, Rodin had both a brilliant technique and something to day. It was Rodin’s imaginative modeling that re-established sculpture as exaggeration rather than description or literal imitation. Rodin had realized the purification and elevation of sculptural aesthetic by his use of modeling and light. No sculptor of the age could compete with him in the expressiveness