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The Thinker original cast at the Musée Rodin in Paris.
The Thinker (French: Le Penseur) is a bronze and marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin, held in the Musée Rodin, in Paris. It depicts a man in sober meditation battling with a powerful internal struggle. It is often used to represent philosophy.
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Originally named The Poet, the piece was part of a commission by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, to create a monumental portal to act as the door of the museum. Rodin based his theme on The Divine Comedy of Dante and entitled the portal The Gates of Hell. Each of the statues in the piece represented one of the main characters in the epic poem. The Thinker was originally meant to depict Dante in front of the Gates of Hell, pondering his great poem. (In the final sculpture, a miniature of the statue sits atop the gates, pondering the hellish fate of those beneath him.) The sculpture is nude, as Rodin wanted a heroic figure in the tradition of Michelangelo, to represent intellect as well as poetry. "The Thinker" is used as a symbol for academic games, as well.
Rodin made a first small plaster version around 1880.
The first large-scale bronze cast was finished in 1902, but was not presented to the public until 1904. It became the property of the city of Paris, thanks to a subscription organized by Rodin admirers, and was put in front of the Panthéon in 1906. In 1922, however, it was moved to the Hôtel Biron, transformed into a Rodin Museum.
More than any other Rodin sculpture, The Thinker moved into the popular imagination, as an immediately recognizable icon of intellectual activity; consequently it has been subject to endless satirical use. This began already in Rodin\'s lifetime. However, not all sculptures reminiscent of The Thinker are inspired by Rodin\'s work. For example, Hugo Rheinhold created his "philosophizing ape" (a cast of which Armand Hammer presented to Lenin in 1922), a small sculpture of a chimpanzee in Thinker pose, meditating on a human skull, in 1892, more than ten years before the piece became accessible to the public.
Until September 2006, the original cast was on display at Sakip Sabancı Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Prior to that, the original cast was displayed in Hartford, Connecticut, at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, in March and April 2006. In early 2007, it was returned to Paris.[citation needed]
Over twenty casts of the sculpture are in museums around the world. Some of these copies are enlarged versions of the original work as well as sculptures of different scales.
The Thinker in front of the Kyoto National Museum
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
| Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) |
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| Works: The Age of Bronze · The Walking Man ·The Thinker · The Kiss · The Gates of Hell · The Burghers of Calais · Monument to Balzac |
| People and places: Camille Claudel · Hôtel Biron, Paris · Musée Rodin, Paris · Rodin Museum, Philadelphia |
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