“The Thinker”
“The Thinker” is a magnificent bronze sculpture cast in 1901 by the French realist artist, Auguste Rodin. Rodin first made this piece as the central figure of a larger doorway sculpture from 1880, titled “The Gates of Hell”. This monumental sculpture contained several figures and included some of his most famous independent works, including “The Kiss” and “The Thinker”.
Rodin first called the central figure within the larger sculpture, and our item of focus today, as “The Poet”. As the focus of the overall sculpture, it was meant to be Dante himself watching and contemplating over the circles of Hell. The figure was seated at the lintel on top of the doorway. However, the workers who were recasting it nicknamed the man as “The Thinker” after Michelangelo‘s famous piece of the same name of Lorenzo de Medici from 1526 to 1531.
In 1880, Rodin got a job as a designer at the Sèvres national porcelain factory. One of his commissions that year was to create a set of two large bronze doors for the main entrance into a museum of arts. Rodin decided to create his own interpretation of Dante’s, ‘The Divine Comedy’. He later titled it “The Gates of Hell”. The museum was actually never created. The commission was extremely intricate, and Rodin worked on it for decades. It was never fully completed before his death in 1917.
Rodin liked the central figure so much that he exhibited it on its own in 1888. In 1904 he decided to recast it as a life-size sculpture, and officially renamed it to “The Thinker”. It was displayed that same year and was an immediate success. There have been many versions and various sizes of this sculpture made to date.
“The Thinker” is on display in various locations across the world. It can be seen at many locations including but not limited to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, at Rodin’s house in the Parisian suburb of Meudon, and at the Musée Rodin in Paris, France.
For more on Auguste Rodin, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
