Auguste Rodin

Rodin was born in Paris on 12 November 1840 into a working-class family. He trained at the Petite Ecole, the city's free school of decorative drawing, from 1854 to 1857, and was rejected three times by the more prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He spent his early career as an ornamental craftsman and as an assistant in the studio of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, learning the commercial decorative trade rather than the fine-art salon system.

His breakthrough came in 1877 with The Age of Bronze, a life-sized male nude so convincing that critics accused him of casting it directly from a living model, a practice known as surmoulage. The accusation was a scandal, but once Rodin cleared his name the episode established his reputation for unprecedented naturalism. In 1880 he received the commission that would occupy him for the rest of his life: a monumental bronze portal, The Gates of Hell, from which he extracted many of his most famous independent figures, including The Thinker and The Kiss.

Over the following decades Rodin produced the public monuments that anchor his reputation, among them The Burghers of Calais and the controversial Monument to Balzac. In 1916, a year before his death, he bequeathed his entire estate, including the molds and models for his sculptures, to the French state in exchange for the creation of a museum. He died at Meudon on 17 November 1917. The Musee Rodin opened in Paris in 1919 and remains his heir, holding both his moral rights and the authority to cast authorized editions.

Rodin's standing has been unusually volatile for an artist of his rank. In his lifetime he was the most celebrated sculptor in Europe; the poet Rainer Maria Rilke served as his secretary and wrote a monograph that Rodin himself called the finest interpretation of his work. After his death his reputation fell sharply, and by the mid-twentieth century the art historian Leo Steinberg described it as being in full decline, dismissed by a modernism that prized abstraction over the expressive figure. Steinberg's essays of the 1960s, later collected in Other Criteria, are usually credited with the scholarly rehabilitation that restored Rodin as a genuine modern innovator rather than a Victorian relic. The recurring critical theme is the fragment and the surface: Rodin's willingness to exhibit partial figures, to leave the marble rough, and to treat the modelled skin as an emotional field is now read as the hinge between nineteenth-century sculpture and the twentieth century. Debate continues over the posthumous casts and how they bear on the meaning of an original.

Rodin's auction high is L'Eternel Printemps, a marble version of the embracing-lovers composition, which sold for USD 20.4 million at Sotheby's New York on 9 May 2016 against an estimate of USD 8 million to 12 million. The result is instructive because the record belongs to a unique marble rather than to one of the bronzes that make up most of his market. Among bronzes, casts of Eve and Iris have cleared USD 16 million to 19 million, and a 1906 cast of The Thinker made USD 15.3 million at Sotheby's in 2013. The defining feature of the Rodin market is breadth: many compositions exist in numerous authorized casts and in several sizes, which gives the market depth and liquidity but also makes the price of any single object highly specific to its cast history.

The first thing to understand about Rodin is that buying his work means buying a cast, and casts are not equal. French law since 1956 limits an original bronze edition to twelve casts per work and per size, numbered 1/8 to 8/8 and I/IV to IV/IV. Within that framework, value separates sharply along three lines: lifetime casts made under Rodin's own supervision, authorized posthumous casts produced by the Musee Rodin from the bequeathed molds, and unauthorized aftercasts, which French law requires to be marked Reproduction and which sit far below the others. A 1968 statute also requires the date of casting to be inscribed, which aids dating. Because Rodin holds a full catalogue raisonne tradition and the Musee Rodin acts as the authenticating heir, provenance and foundry documentation matter as much as condition. For a collector, the depth of the market is a source of liquidity, but it is also the reason that two objects of the same title can be priced an order of magnitude apart. The work to do before any purchase is on the cast, its number, its foundry, and its authorization, not on the image alone.