The Musée Rodin has one peculiarity: the artist chose the building himself. Auguste Rodin found the hôtel Biron, a mansion of 1732 on rue de Varenne, almost derelict in 1908. He rented four rooms on the ground floor, then from 1911 the whole building, and there he prepared the museum that opened on 4 August 1919, two years after his death.
The museum has two halves: the eighteen rooms of the mansion, full of light thanks to the tall windows onto the garden, and three hectares of garden with the monumental bronzes among the roses and the box hedges. Of the ten works I point out, four are in the garden and six in the mansion, and for the latter I give you the room.
The museum is closed on Mondays, and the 14-euro ticket always covers both mansion and garden: the garden-only ticket that many people remember no longer appears among the prices. Every entry in the museum’s catalogue also warns that works may go out on loan to other museums, and at the end I tell you how to check.
Who was The Thinker, originally?
Let’s begin!
1. The Thinker
Start in the garden. The Thinker sits on a tall pillar, among the roses and the box hedges, with the facade of the mansion behind him.
He was Dante. Rodin modelled him in 1880, about seventy centimetres high, for the centre of The Gates of Hell, where the poet leans forward to look down on the circles of hell and meditates on his work. The museum describes him like this: a tortured body, almost one of the damned, and at the same time a free man determined to rise above suffering through poetry.
From 1888 Rodin showed him on his own, and in 1904 he enlarged him. What you see is the cast from that year, by the Alexis Rudier foundry, 1.89 metres tall. Look at the pose: the right elbow rests on the left knee, not the right, and the whole body is twisted. Nobody actually thinks sitting like that.
2. The Gates of Hell
The garden also holds The Gates of Hell: a bronze portal covered in bodies, and above the doors, small, The Thinker in his original version.
It is the laboratory of his whole life. Rodin worked on it for years, modelled more than two hundred figures and groups, and then left it unfinished at the end of the 1880s. From those figures he derived independent statues for the rest of his career, starting with The Thinker and The Kiss.
The bronze you see is a cast of 1928, produced for the museum after his death. Rodin never saw the complete Gates in bronze: it was the museum’s first curator, Léonce Bénédite, who persuaded him in 1917 to let it be reconstructed.
3. The Burghers of Calais
In 1884 the town of Calais asked Rodin for a monument to the six leading citizens who in 1347, at the end of the English siege in the Hundred Years’ War, went to the king of England to hand over the keys of the town, ready to die so that its people would be spared.
Walk all the way round it: it is meant to be seen from every side. The six men share the same base but do not look at each other and do not touch: each is alone before death, in a tunic, barefoot, with a rope round his neck. Each has a different gesture, from despair to resignation. Rodin studied them naked and then dressed them.
In Calais the monument was installed in 1895, but not as he wanted: Rodin would have liked it very high, against the sky, or else on the ground, on the paving of the square, «like a living rosary of suffering and sacrifice». In the museum garden it is almost at eye level, and it works.
4. The Monument to Balzac
Why did Paris reject Rodin’s Balzac?
Because it was not a portrait. The writers’ society commissioned the monument in 1891, and Rodin worked on it for six years. The result was a figure wrapped in the monk’s dressing gown Balzac wore to write, without the armchair, the pen and the books a monument to a writer was supposed to have. And the head was reduced to a few violent strokes.
Shown in 1898, it caused a scandal, and the commission was cancelled. Rodin never saw it in bronze: the cast in front of you, 2.70 metres tall, dates from 1935, eighteen years after his death.
5. The Age of Bronze
Go into the mansion. On the ground floor, in room 3, is Rodin’s first major work, modelled in Brussels: The Age of Bronze, a young nude man standing, one arm raised.
The model was a Belgian soldier, Auguste Ney. Originally the statue held a spear in its left hand, and Rodin removed it to free the gesture from any attribute.
What was Rodin accused of over his first major statue?
Of cheating. Shown in Paris, The Age of Bronze looked so real that the critics claimed Rodin had taken a cast from the living model. Rodin had to prove that he had modelled it by studying the profiles one by one, and in the end his accusers admitted he was right. The scandal won him the commission for The Gates of Hell.
6. The Kiss
In room 5, on the ground floor, is The Kiss, in marble, 1.81 metres tall. The two lovers were originally Paolo and Francesca for The Gates of Hell, and Rodin took them out of the portal to make them a work of their own.
The public, finding no detail that said who they were, simply named it The Kiss. The State ordered a large marble version in 1888, and Rodin took almost ten years to deliver it. He called it his «big knick-knack», and in 1898 he showed it next to the Balzac, perhaps precisely to make the Balzac easier to accept.
7. The Danaid
In room 7 is a small sculpture, seventy centimetres long, that many people skip. The Danaids of myth are condemned to fill a bottomless jar for all eternity, for having killed their husbands on their wedding night.
Rodin does not choose the moment of the task but that of despair before a pointless labour: the woman has collapsed, exhausted, and what you see is above all the line of the back and the nape of the neck. The museum calls it «a female landscape». Move slowly around the base: the back changes with every step.
8. The Cathedral
Go up to the first floor. In room 10 is a sculpture 64 centimetres high: two right hands reaching towards each other, belonging to two different figures.
The title came late, probably in 1914, when Rodin published his book on the cathedrals of France. Look at the space between the two hands: that is the subject, a void that closes upwards like a Gothic vault. Rilke, who was for a time his secretary, wrote that for Rodin «the participation of the air» mattered enormously.
9. Camille Claudel’s The Waltz
In room 16, on the first floor, the author changes. The Waltz is by Camille Claudel, first Rodin’s pupil in 1884, then his companion until their final break in 1898.
A couple turns around a slanting axis, tilted so far that they seem about to fall, and the drapery flowing from the dancer’s hips flies out to the side like a wave. When Claudel showed it at the Salon, in 1893, she was reproached for a «violent accent of reality», unfit for a gallery open to the public. It is just 43 centimetres high, and it is enough to show that Claudel had her own idea of movement: she was not only Rodin’s woman.
10. The Walking Man
The last work is in room 17, The Walking Man: a body with no head and no arms, thrown forward, more than two metres tall.
It was born from an assemblage, around 1900: the legs of a study for another statue and a cracked torso, put together. Looking at ancient statues, almost all of them mutilated, Rodin had understood that a fragment loses none of its force. «Here is a hand… broken off at the wrist, it has no fingers left, just a palm, and it is so true that to see it live I do not need the fingers», he said in 1904. Look at the legs, smooth, and the torso full of cracks: it is pure movement, with no story to tell.
The museum’s collection also includes a painting Rodin bought for himself, Van Gogh’s Père Tanguy, one of the three portraits of the colour merchant, the one with the background of Japanese prints. If you find it on display, stop.
Practical information
Data checked on 22 September 2026 on the official website musee-rodin.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. A full ticket costs 14 euros and covers the mansion, the garden and the current exhibition. There are three joint tickets: with the Musée d’Orsay at 25 euros, with the Musée du quai Branly at 23 euros and with the Musée de l’Armée at 26 euros. The audio guide costs 6.50 euros. Free admission. The museum is free on the first Sunday of the month from October to March, with no booking needed. Those entitled to free entry, young people for instance, go in by showing their document at the entrance, without booking. Opening hours. The museum and the garden open from Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:30, with the last admission at 17:45. It is closed on Mondays, as well as on 1 January, 1 May and 25 December. Works on loan. The museum warns that its works may be lent and that their presence is not guaranteed. Each work has an entry on the website, with its room: open it before you set off if you are coming for a particular statue. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is covered by the Paris Museum Pass. Getting there. The entrance is at 77 rue de Varenne. The metro stops at Varenne, on line 13, or at Invalides, on lines 8 and 13 and on RER C. How long to allow. The garden needs an hour, the mansion another. There is a café in the garden, and in good weather it is worth stopping there between the two halves.
The exhibitions on at the museum are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
The museum is five minutes on foot from the Invalides, and the joint ticket with the Musée de l’Armée saves you money: from the garden you can already see the golden dome of the Dôme. The pose of The Thinker, the museum says, owes a great deal to Carpeaux’s Ugolino, which is at the Musée d’Orsay, and to Michelangelo’s Lorenzo de’ Medici: in Paris you can see Michelangelo’s Slaves at the Louvre.
Photo credits: The Thinker, The Gates of Hell, The Kiss and The Waltz by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0); The Burghers of Calais by Shadowgate (CC BY 2.0); the Monument to Balzac by Jeff Kubina (CC BY-SA 2.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
