French sculptor Auguste Rodin is known for creating several iconic works, including "The Age of Bronze," "The Thinker," "The Kiss" and "The Burghers of Calais."

Array of Famous Sculptures

By the following decade, as Rodin entered his 40s, he was able to further establish his distinct artistic style with an acclaimed, sometimes controversial list of works, eschewing academic formality for a vital suppleness of form. With a large team assisting him in the final casting of sculptures, Rodin thus went on to create an array of famous works, including "The Burghers of Calais," a public monument made of bronze portraying a moment during the Hundred Years' War between France and England, in 1347. The piece, which includes six human statues, depicts a war account during which six French citizens from Calais were ordered by monarch Edward III of England to abandon their home and surrender themselves—barefoot and bareheaded, wearing ropes around their necks and holding the keys to the town and the caste in their hands—to the king, who was to order their execution thereafter. "The Burghers of Calais" is a portrayal of the moment that the citizens exited the town; the group was later spared death due to the request of Queen Philippa. Rodin began working on the monument in 1884, after being commissioned by Calais to create it. However, the piece wasn't unveiled there until more than a decade later, in 1895.

After being commissioned to create an entrance piece for a planned museum (which was never built) in 1880, Rodin began working on "The Gates of Hell," an intricate monument partially inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy andCharles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. The monument consisted of various sculpted figures, including the iconic "The Thinker" (1880, meant to be a representation of Dante himself and "Gates"'s crowning piece), "The Three Shades" (1886), "The Old Courtesan" (1887) and the posthumously discovered "Man With Serpent" (1887). Although Rodin wished to exhibit the completed "Gates" by the end of the decade, the project proved to be more time-consuming than originally anticipated and remained uncompleted. (Decades later, curator Léonce Bénédite initiated the reconstruction of the fragmented work for a 1928 bronze casting.) Rodin produced other major sculptures over the ensuing years, including monuments to French literary greats Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac.

Rodin died on November 17, 1917, in Meudon, France, passing away months after the death of his partner Rose Beuret. Garnering acclaim for more than a century, Rodin is widely regarded as the pioneer of modern sculpture. With samples of his work found around the world, his legacy continues to be studied and deeply admired by fellow artists, experts, scholars and art connoisseurs, as well as those with an untrained eye.

The Rodin Museum was opened in August 1919 in a Paris mansion that housed the artist's studio during his final years. After several years of reconstruction, the museum was reopened in 2015 on Nov. 12, Rodin's birthday. With much of its revenue supplied by the sale of bronze casts made from original molds, the space also features unearthed pieces from Camille Claudel, who was Rodin's lover/muse and worked as his assistant for some time. Their relationship is said to have inspired many of the artist's more overtly amorous works, including 1882's "The Kiss."