Rodin: The Man and His Art, with Leaves from His Note-book

The architect of to-day plans out his monument in his own study on a piece of paper and produces it ready-made. Whether this mass of stone obliterates the buildings that surroun...

Alas! we are not prepared to see and to feel. Our sorry education, far from cultivating in us the feeling for enthusiasm, makes us in our youth little pedants who without result...

It may be that this slackening of taste and knowledge is necessary. Perhaps it is a period of transition, a fallow period required by the intelligence like that required by a so...

For a time Rodin's friends hoped that America, the nation of work par excellence, would seize upon this idea. They pictured the philanthropists of the New World in characteristi...

It is almost day. The blackbird has ended his scene of love; no one was about when he sang his song of spring and harmony. The flowers listened, and blossomed at the call of thi...

The gestation of this work was accompanied by a thousand miseries. The committee of the Société des Gens de Lettres incessantly demanded the "Balzac"; they were dumfounded befor...

He had the opportunity of seeing his modeling corrected by Carpeaux. The great sculptor, in fact, taught at the Petite Ecole. Upon his return from Rome, he had asked for a modes...

The municipality of Calais, hearing that there were to be six statues instead of the one that had been ordered, took umbrage, and deliberated for two years. The heroic group wai...

"The man who awakens to nature," said Rodin, in the presence of his statue. Indeed the body bends over, as if under the exquisite caress of the breezes of spring. The hand rests...

Of Auguste Rodin one thing may be said without fear of contradiction: among his contemporaries to-day he is preëminently the master. Born at Paris, 1840,--the natal year of his...

Rodin remained about five years with Carrier-Belleuse. What works his active hands accomplished there in a day! One still finds them in the shops of the sellers of bronzes, in t...

I do not draw them, but I see them in place, and my spirit is content, accustoms itself to the impression. In memory I still make drawings of this model, and these moving lines...

Several years have already gone by since the career of Rodin attained its full growth. From now on, therefore, it can be envisaged as a whole, and we can trace the formation and...

In Paris, where he is daily and where he works every afternoon, he lives in an exquisite, but ruinous, mansion of the eighteenth century, situated in a rustic, neglected park. T...

The subject chosen by Rodin for his decorative panels, then, was hell--hell as Dante conceived it in a vision that lends itself, for that matter, marvelously to a plastic realiz...

Soon after his return from Italy, Rodin executed the great study entitled "The Creation of Man." In it he exaggerated the rhythm so characteristic of the Florentine, the balanci...

This search for the envelopment of forms fruitful of new effects is the decisive point in the career of Rodin; it is the supreme thought, the end and aim of sixty years of toil...