Musée Rodin

Museum · Invalides / Faubourg Saint-Germain (7th)Paris,France

Rodin's last address in Paris, its three-hectare garden holding The Thinker and The Gates of Hell where he set them out himself.

The Musée Rodin puts its sculpture outdoors, in a three-hectare garden behind the Hôtel Biron. The Thinker sits on a high pedestal among clipped box bushes, looking across the lawn at The Gates of Hell, a bronze door crawling with small twisting figures. Balzac stands further off, a bulk in a dressing gown. Rodin set his own work out in this garden while he was living and working here, and the museum kept the habit. Indoors, eighteen rooms of sculpture run through the house, lit by tall windows onto the same garden. Rodin never owned the house. Rilke, who worked as his secretary, told him about a half-empty mansion going cheap; Rodin took four ground-floor rooms and within three years had the whole building. In 1916 he gave the French state everything he had ever made, on the condition that a museum be set up here. He died the following year and never saw it open. That is worth carrying round the rooms with you: this was his last address, not a collection assembled about him afterwards.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The front and the back are two different gardens — Rose beds flank the courtyard at the entrance; behind the house you pass the pond and reach a bronze Orpheus in the trees.
The roses run late spring into June, and by August the beds are past their best — In October the trees behind the house turn gold, which suits the dark bronzes underneath.
Six bronze men, roped and barefoot, stand near the railings on rue de Varenne — The Burghers of Calais is one of the few works you can see from the pavement without going through the gate.
The marbles were cut by hired carvers, not by Rodin — He modelled in clay and plaster and paid trained stonecutters to work the marble, so the white plasters indoors are the pieces his own hands shaped.
On a hot day the garden beats the house — The rooms holding the permanent collection have no air conditioning, while outside the trees throw deep shade over the benches.

Things to do

1
Pick single figures out of The Gates of Hell
Stand close to the door, near enough that you can no longer take in its whole shape. In the crowd of small bodies find The Thinker, seated in the panel above the two door halves, and the three identical men leaning inward at the top. No bronze of this door existed while Rodin lived; the museum had this one cast in 1928.
2
Circle Balzac until the gold dome lines up behind him
The Monument to Balzac shows the novelist in the monk's robe he wore while writing, head thrown back and arms hidden inside it. Walk slowly around the figure until the gilded dome of Les Invalides, the old soldiers' home next door, swings into place behind him. The writers' society that ordered the statue refused it in 1898.
3
Find the crawling father out in the pond
Ugolino and His Sons stands in the water at the centre of the ornamental pond, so the bank is as close as you get. A father on all fours crawls over his dying children. It is a scene of starvation in hell, and Rodin first modelled it for The Gates of Hell. Walk round the rim until you face him head on.
4
Follow one body from clay to plaster to marble
Inside the house the same bodies come back at different sizes and in different materials. Pick a figure you liked in the garden, then hunt for it indoors as a rough clay sketch, as white plaster, and as polished marble. Rodin reused, turned and rescaled his figures throughout his working life.