Auguste Rodin’s freestanding bronzes parallel the Impressionists’…

Auguste Rodin’s freestanding bronzes parallel the Impressionists’ ideas of form and light.

The success of St. Jean-Baptiste próchant and that of The Age of Bronze at the salons of Paris and Brussels in 1880 establish Rodin's reputation as a sculptor at the age of forty.

At an age when most artists already have completed a large body of work, Rodin is just beginning to affirm his personal art.

He receives a state commission to create a bronze door for the future Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a grant that provides him with two workshops and whose advance payments make him financially secure.

His original conception is similar to that of the fifteenth-century Italian sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti in his Gates of Paradise door for the Baptistery in Florence, borrowing the theme of its scenes from Dante's Divine Comedy.

Studies for the monumental work result in one of his most famous images: Le Penseur (The Thinker), for which he sculpts the first small plaster version in 1880, originally conceived as a seated portrait of Dante for the upper part of the door.