Auguste Rodin changed what sculpture could be. He left surfaces rough where his contemporaries polished them, broke the figure open, and let a single hand or a turned back carry the weight of a whole work. The museum given over to him holds the fullest account of that anywhere, from the great public bronzes to the small studies where you can almost watch him thinking.
His work is shared between the rooms of a mansion and the garden around it, which he used as an open-air studio. The tour moves through both, and through the people closest to him, Camille Claudel above all.
What you will see
The museum. Indoors, the rooms follow Rodin from first idea to finished bronze. There are the plaster models and studies where a pose is tested and reworked, the drawings he made without stopping, and the sculpture of Camille Claudel, his student, collaborator and companion, whose own work is shown here and whose life took a far harder turn than his. Among the paintings he gathered to live with are works by Monet, van Gogh and Renoir.
The garden. Outside, his major bronzes stand among the formal beds. Le Penseur, La Porte de l'Enfer, worked and reworked across the last decades of his life, and Les Bourgeois de Calais, the six men who walked out to surrender their city in 1347. Seeing them in open air, at the scale Rodin meant them to have, is what makes this museum unlike any other in Paris.
The garden bronzes · the studies and drawings · Rodin and Camille Claudel
Pépin's advice
Spend time in the garden. The works in the garden are the reason to come. Allow at least forty-five minutes outside before going into the mansion.
Make a pause of it. The garden has a café and restaurant set among the sculptures, and when the weather is kind it is one of the more pleasant places in Paris to stop for lunch or a coffee partway through the visit.
Make a pair of it. The Musée Bourdelle, a short way west, was the studio of Antoine Bourdelle, who trained under Rodin and became a master in his own right. The Musée d'Orsay sets Rodin among the painters and sculptors of his generation. Either makes a natural companion to the morning, and we can build the day around it.
