Friday was a great day to visit the Rodin museum, which is housed in an 18th-century hôtel with an interesting history. It was built in 1731 for some guy who got rich quick in paper money speculation. As he died only a year later, it went to a duchess and then to Marshall Biron, a hero in the Battle of Fontenoy in the War of Austrian Succession, whose name it now carries. When Biron's heir was guillotined in the Revolution, it became a government building--home to the Papal legate and then the Russian ambassador. In 1820 it became a Catholic boarding school for girls, which was closed in 1905 with the separation of church and state law. It was then subdivided and there were plans to tear it down and replace it with apartments, but good old Rodin rented some rooms for sculpture storage and started pushing for a museum of his work. He bequested his property and work and the museum opened in 1919, two years after his death. That's the history lesson, now on to today's art lesson:
The Cathedral, stone, 1909
Mozart, marble, 1911
A chandelier.
The Farewell, plaster, 1898
Sleep, marble, 1894
Edward Munch, Rodin's Thinker in the Park
The real Thinker.
One of, in my opinion, way too many Balzac heads, busts and statues in that room.
I love Victor's pose here.
One of his most famous, The Burghers of Calais, 1888. After a year-long siege of Calais by the English during the Hundred Years War (1347), King Edward III offered to spare the city if six of its top leaders would surrender the keys to the castle and themselves for execution. Their lives were spared when the queen convinced Edward to let them go. Under French law no more than 12 casts were allowed to be made after Rodin's death. The original is in Calais, and the others are spread out across the world. This is the first version that got rejected.
Van Gogh, anyone?
This is what the real one looks like.
The gold Invalides dome.
The hôtel from behind.
The Thinker outside with the Eiffel Tower peeking out beside him.
And finally, a lesson in hair-flipping.
We amused ourselves like this for quite a while. Good thing the garden was pretty empty.
That's physics.
The Cathedral, stone, 1909
Mozart, marble, 1911
A chandelier.
The Farewell, plaster, 1898
Sleep, marble, 1894
Edward Munch, Rodin's Thinker in the Park
The real Thinker.
One of, in my opinion, way too many Balzac heads, busts and statues in that room.
I love Victor's pose here.
One of his most famous, The Burghers of Calais, 1888. After a year-long siege of Calais by the English during the Hundred Years War (1347), King Edward III offered to spare the city if six of its top leaders would surrender the keys to the castle and themselves for execution. Their lives were spared when the queen convinced Edward to let them go. Under French law no more than 12 casts were allowed to be made after Rodin's death. The original is in Calais, and the others are spread out across the world. This is the first version that got rejected.
Van Gogh, anyone?
This is what the real one looks like.
The gold Invalides dome.
The hôtel from behind.
The Thinker outside with the Eiffel Tower peeking out beside him.
And finally, a lesson in hair-flipping.
We amused ourselves like this for quite a while. Good thing the garden was pretty empty.
That's physics.
1 comment:
Indeed! Thanks for the lessons, Summer!
Post a Comment