Sexy Hot Beauty

When Auguste Rodin died in 1917, he was the most famous and financially successful artist in the world. Yet one of the most remarkable things about his life is that he became an artist at all.

He was born in 1840, the son of a police inspector. Near-sighted and severely dyslexic, at the age of 14 he was sent to a technical college that trained craftsmen, not fine artists. Three years later, he failed to gain admission to the Grand Ecole, where young men studied to become academic sculptors.

This meant that for the next 20 years he was condemned to make his living among the almost anonymous army of statuaires and ornementistes, moving wherever he could find work as an assistant to cabinet-makers, goldsmiths, fine artists, plasterers and commercial decorators.

In doing so he perfected his skills both in modelling clay and carving stone and marble. By his mid-thirties, Rodin was capable of working in any style or medium he chose, yet he had not quite crossed the fine line that separated the labourer from the sculptor.

It took him 18 years to save enough money to visit Italy but when he did, in 1875, his visceral response to the art of Donatello and Michelangelo proved to be the key that unlocked his imagination.

What he learned from them we can see in the first gallery of the Royal Academy’s magnificent retrospective of Rodin’s work. The Age of Bronze is a sensuous male nude so lifelike that when it was shown in the Salon of 1877 rumours circulated that it was not a work of fine art at all, but cast from the body of a living model.

To eyes accustomed to the conventions of beaux-arts classicism, the sculpture was shocking because it peeled off a layer of artifice to show the human body as it really is, not as his viewers expected to see it. From now on, Rodin would translate as directly as possible into clay what his eye saw and, in the sensuously tactile surfaces of his work, what his hand felt when he caressed the bodies of his female models.

Though Rodin stood outside the academic establishment, he was not a realist in the sense that the Impressionists, his exact contemporaries, were. As the title The Age of Bronze suggests, his subjects were literary, romantic, and philosophical, often taken from mythology and history and steeped in the language of allegory and symbol.