This is a list of The Thinker sculptures made by Auguste Rodin. The Thinker , originally a part of Rodin's The Gates of Hell , exists in several versions. The original size and the later monumental size versions were both created by Rodin, and the most valuable versions are those created under his supervision. There was also a limited edition of 25 copies made from the original plaster mold by the Musée Rodin after Rodin's death.
The Thinker exists as bronze casts, exhibition plaster casts (some were painted to look like bronze patina), and original production plasters, which some consider art objects today.
Location | Image | Size | Material | Date | Notes | References |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne | Original | Bronze | 1884 | Earliest bronze casting, has Florentine cap | [1] | |
Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva | Original | Bronze | 1896 | [2] | ||
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. | Original | Bronze | 1901 | [3] | ||
Panthéon, Latin Quarter, Paris (destroyed) | Monumental | Plaster, bronze-tinted | 1904 | Earliest monumental. The statue was vandalized and later scrapped. | [4] | |
The Burrell Collection | Original | Bronze | 1902 | Bought by Mr. Burrell in 1922. Many fingerprints and marks were left by the sculptor. | [5] [6] | |
University of Louisville | Monumental | Bronze | 1903 | First casting by A. A. Hébrard, lost wax technique, displayed at Louisiana Purchase Exposition | [4] [7] | |
Commissioned by Max Linde in 1903. Today Detroit Institute of Arts | Monumental | Bronze | 1903 | First casting by Alexis Rudier, sand casting, four days younger than Louisville copy, publicly displayed at Leipzig and Berlin | [8] [9] | |
Metropolitan Museum, New York | Monumental | Plaster, bronze-tinted | 1904 | Sent to the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis to replace the bronze version | [4] | |
Musée Rodin, Paris | Monumental | Bronze | 1904 | Installed outside Paris Panthéon in 1906, moved to Musée Rodin garden in 1922 | [10] | |
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek | Monumental | Bronze | 1904 | the "third Hébrard copy" | [11] [4] | |
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden | Monumental | Plaster | 1904 | acquired by museum in October 1904 | [4] | |
National Museum, Poznań | Monumental | Plaster | 1904 | acquired in January 1905 | [4] [12] | |
Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art | Monumental | Plaster | 1904 | purchased from the artist in 1907 | [13] | |
Legion of Honor, San Francisco | Monumental | Bronze | 1904 | Alexis Rudier cast, purchased in 1915, donated to San Francisco in 1922 | [14] | |
Private collection, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts | Original | Bronze | 1906 | made for Ralph Pulitzer, sold for $15.3 million in 2013 | [ citation needed ] | |
Laeken Cemetery, Brussels | Monumental | Bronze | 1906 | Alexis Rudier cast, installed on the grave of Jef Dillen in 1927 | [4] [15] [16] | |
Ca' Pesaro, Venice | Monumental | Plaster, bronze-tinted | 1907 | purchased at the 1907 Biennale | [17] | |
Congressional Plaza, Buenos Aires | Monumental | Bronze | 1907 | Purchased by the museum director to Auguste Rodin, one of the three sculptures cast in the original mold and signed by him | [18] [19] [20] | |
Waldemarsudde, Sweden | Monumental | Bronze | 1908 | Alexis Rudier cast, for Prince Eugen of Norway and Sweden | [21] | |
Private collection | Original | Bronze | 1916 | sold for $11.8 million in 2010 | [22] [23] | |
Rodin's tomb, Meudon | Monumental | Bronze | 1916 | Alexis Rudier cast, placed at the grave when his wife died | [4] | |
Cleveland Museum of Art | Monumental | Bronze | 1916 | Alexis Rudier cast, purchased 1916, damaged in 1970 and remains unrepaired. According to police, the perpetrators were a faction of the Weathermen, possibly the same individuals killed in a bomb-making accident in New York City, [11] although police never charged anyone in the bombing. | [11] [24] [25] | |
Musée Rodin at Meudon | Monumental | Plaster, bronze-tinted | 1916 | the museum has several plaster casts in different sizes and of different ages | [26] |
François Auguste René Rodin was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, and deeply pocketed surface in clay. He is known for such sculptures as The Thinker, Monument to Balzac, The Kiss, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gates of Hell.
Antoine Bourdelle, born Émile Antoine Bordelles, was an influential and prolific French sculptor and teacher. He was a student of Auguste Rodin, a teacher of Giacometti and Henri Matisse, and an important figure in the Art Deco movement and the transition from the Beaux-Arts style to modern sculpture.
The Thinker, by Auguste Rodin, is a bronze sculpture situated atop a stone pedestal depicting a nude male figure of heroic size sitting on a rock. He is seen leaning over, his right elbow placed on his left thigh, holding the weight of his chin on the back of his right hand. The pose is one of deep thought and contemplation, and the statue is often used as an image to represent philosophy.
The Burghers of Calais is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin in twelve original castings and numerous copies. It commemorates an event during the Hundred Years' War, when Calais, a French port on the English Channel, surrendered to the English after an eleven-month siege. The city commissioned Rodin to create the sculpture in 1884 and the work was completed in 1889.
The Musée Rodin of Paris, France, is an art museum that was opened in 1919, primarily dedicated to the works of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. It has two sites: the Hôtel Biron and surrounding grounds in central Paris, as well as just outside Paris at Rodin's old home, the Villa des Brillants at Meudon, Hauts-de-Seine. The collection includes 6,600 sculptures, 8,000 drawings, 8,000 old photographs and 7,000 objets d'art. The museum receives 700,000 visitors annually.
The Kiss is an 1882 marble sculpture by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
The Gates of Hell is a monumental bronze sculptural group work by French artist Auguste Rodin that depicts a scene from the Inferno, the first section of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. It stands at 6 metres high, 4 metres wide and 1 metre deep (19.7×13.1×3.3 ft) and contains 180 figures.
The Age of Bronze is a bronze statue by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). The figure is of a life-size nude male, 72 in. (182.9 cm) high. Rodin continued to produce casts of the statue for several decades after it was modelled in 1876.
Bernard Gerald Cantor was the founder and chairman of securities firm Cantor Fitzgerald.
The Walking Man is a bronze sculpture by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. This sculpture was made in 1907.
Monument to Balzac is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin in memory of the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. According to Rodin, the sculpture aims to portray the writer's persona rather than a physical likeness. The work was commissioned in 1891 by the Société des Gens de Lettres and a full-size plaster model was displayed in 1898 at a Salon in Champ de Mars. After coming under criticism the model was rejected by the société and Rodin moved it to his home in Meudon. On 2 July 1939 the model was cast in bronze for the first time and placed on the Boulevard du Montparnasse at the intersection with Boulevard Raspail.
Cantor Arts Center is an art museum on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California, United States.
Saint John the Baptist (preaching) is a bronze sculpture, by Auguste Rodin.
Modern sculpture is generally considered to have begun with the work of Auguste Rodin, who is seen as the progenitor of modern sculpture. While Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past, he created a new way of building his works. He "dissolved the hard outline of contemporary Neo-Greek academicism, and thereby created a vital synthesis of opacity and transparency, volume and void". Along with a few other artists in the late 19th century who experimented with new artistic visions in sculpture like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Rodin invented a radical new approach in the creation of sculpture. Modern sculpture, along with all modern art, "arose as part of Western society's attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged during the nineteenth century".
The Spirit of Eternal Repose is a 1898–1899 sculpture of a sprite by French artist Auguste Rodin.
Cybele is a sculpture by French artist Auguste Rodin. It is one of the first of Rodin's partial figures known as "fragments" to be displayed as sculpture in its own right, rather than an incomplete study.
The Three Shades is a sculptural group produced in plaster by Auguste Rodin in 1886 for his The Gates of Hell. He made several individual studies for the Shades before finally deciding to put them together as three identical figures gathered around a central point. The heads hang low so that the neck and shoulders form an almost-horizontal plane. They were to be placed above the gates looking down on the viewer.
Despair or Despair at the Gate is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin that he conceived and developed from the early 1880s to c. 1890 as part of his The Gates of Hell project. The figure belongs to a company of damned souls found in the nine circles of Hell described by Dante in The Divine Comedy. Other title variations are Shade Holding her Foot, Woman Holding Her Foot, and Desperation. There are numerous versions of this work executed as both plaster and bronze casts and carved marble and limestone.
Mask of a Weeping Woman is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin, initially produced as a pair with Weeping Woman for the first version of his The Gates of Hell in 1885. The two pieces were intended to appear on the centre of each panel. They were later moved by Rodin himself, who instead placed Mask on the lower part of the left panel.
The AsiaUniversity purchased Rodin'sThe Thinker as the highlight object of the Museum collection.
Donation of Rodin's The Thinker:A Generous Birthday Give[sic] to NTHU