Rodin Museum

About Us:

The Rodin Museum is open again after undergoing a full-scale reinstallation focusing on the artist’s use of live models, his unique studio practice, and his international acclaim for portraiture. The works on view include such renowned subjects as Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, the women in Rodin’s life including Rose Beuret and Camille Claudel, and several works that haven’t been exhibited for many years. The reinstallation presents the opportunity to appreciate Rodin’s prolific and complicated artistic process from a fresh perspective.

Come and experience the Rodin Museum throughout the year. There are a variety of activities and ways to engage with the artworks, as you make new discoveries in the galleries each time you visit. Learn about Auguste Rodin and his large body of work, find out how this extraordinary Museum found a home in Philadelphia, explore the advances in conservation that have contributed to scholarship on the artist, and see the collection displayed in new ways.

As one of the most revered destinations on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Rodin Museum offers a verdant, intimate setting in which to enjoy some of the world's most renowned masterpieces of sculpture. For the tens of thousands who visit each year, the Museum provides a momentary retreat from urban life in the heart of the city.

History:

Jules E. Mastbaum, Philadelphia's great movie theater magnate and one of its best-known philanthropists, began collecting works by Auguste Rodin in 1923 with the expressed intent of founding a museum to enrich the lives of his fellow citizens. He set about assembling a complete view of Rodin's work, acquiring not only finished bronzes, but plaster studies as well as drawings, prints, letters, and books. By the time of his death in 1926, Mastbaum had brought together the greatest Rodin collection outside of Paris. He had also commissioned two great French Neoclassical architects working in Philadelphia, Paul Cret and by Jacques Gréber, to collaborate on a museum and garden, but did not live to see it completed.

The Rodin Museum, which opened to the public in 1929, houses 124 sculptures, including bronze casts of the artist's greatest works: The Thinker, perhaps the most famous sculpture in the world; The Burghers of Calais, his most heroic and moving historical tribute; Eternal Springtime, one of the most powerful works dealing with human love; powerful monuments to leading French intellectuals such as Apotheosis of Victor Hugo; and the culminating creation of his career, The Gates of Hell, on which the artist worked from 1880 until his death in 1917.