The Thinker

The Thinker began as Dante above The Gates of Hell

In 1880, the French state commissioned François-Auguste-René Rodin, known as Auguste Rodin, to design a monumental doorway for a projected Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. Rodin based The Gates of Hell on the Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. He placed the seated figure above the doors, looking down toward the suffering bodies below.[1]

Rodin first called the figure The Poet. It was Dante contemplating both the damned and the poem that would describe them. The Musée Rodin characterizes this first identity as double: a body caught in suffering and a free mind trying to pass beyond suffering through poetry.[2]

How The Poet became The Thinker

Rodin exhibited the approximately 70-centimetre figure independently in 1888 while keeping it in the design of the Gates. Once separated from Dante's story and the crowded doorway, the solitary body invited a wider reading. Exhibition records used The Poet and Poet/Thinker; by 1896, the shorter title The Thinker had taken hold.[2]

The change did not erase Dante, but it made the figure less like an illustration of one writer. The National Gallery of Art explains that the nudity also helped turn him into a general image of the poet or creator rather than a portrait in fourteenth-century clothing. Thinking here can mean composing, judging, imagining, or struggling to make a work.[3]

What The Thinker means

The most direct meaning is mental work expressed physically. The figure does not calmly possess an answer. His uneven pose and tightened body show concentration under pressure. In the original setting, the pressure came from the scene below: Dante watched the circles of Hell while considering how to turn them into poetry.[2]

As an independent sculpture, the same body became open enough to stand for thought itself. That does not make every interpretation equally historical. Calling him Dante, a poet, or a creator follows the work's documented development. Assigning a specific modern philosophy or diagnosing the figure's private emotion goes beyond the evidence.

Reading the sculpture, detail by detail

Sculpture rewards walking around it. The Thinker's pose looks familiar from photographs of the front, but the composition Rodin built is a three-dimensional tension that only shows itself at the sides and back. Six parts of the body carry six different weights, and each is worth stopping in front of.

The right hand is not held to the chin in the natural gesture, which would put the elbow on the same-side knee. Rodin crossed the arm to the opposite knee, so the back of the hand — knuckles rather than palm — presses under the jaw. The right elbow digs into the top of the left thigh with visible weight. The pose is physically uncomfortable, and Rodin used that discomfort to show thought as physical effort rather than as a philosopher's calm posture.

The mouth is compressed. The brow contracts. Under the beard, the muscles of the neck stand out on the side the head is tipped toward. Rodin gave the face the physical signals of a person holding their breath.

The back is the passage most photographs of the sculpture miss. Read from behind, the spine curves in a heavy arc from the shoulders down through the buttocks. The muscles of the trapezius are bunched from the strain of the crossed arm, and the whole musculature is engaged as if the figure were about to lift something heavy. Rodin was studying Michelangelo's work at the Louvre in the years around 1880, and the back of The Thinker uses the same muscular language as Michelangelo's Slaves — bodies straining, in Michelangelo's case, against the block of marble they are still partly inside.

The left hand rests loose on the left knee. It is the only relaxed part of the body — an open palm and curled fingers cupped over the kneecap, in contrast to the right hand held as a fist under the chin. Rodin uses the left hand as a visual rest, a pause among the tensed muscles that lets the tension elsewhere register by contrast. If the left hand had also been clenched, the sculpture would have read as a diagram of physical stress; because the left hand is open and relaxed, the rest of the body reads as a person under pressure.

The feet grip the rock at different heights. The right foot is planted flat and forward. The left foot is pulled back and up on its toes, pressed against the rock, adding another asymmetry to the twist through the torso. The Thinker is not resting on the rock — every point of contact between the figure and the rock is under load, and the figure is bracing against it.

Up close, the bronze surface preserves the record of Rodin's fingers in the original clay. Ridges, pockets, and pressure marks are visible because Rodin refused to smooth them out. The monumental 1904 cast enlarges these marks until they carry across the sculpture garden. When the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his 1903 book on Rodin (Rilke worked as Rodin's secretary from 1905 to 1906), he described these surfaces as the sculpture's real subject: the way light catches the marked bronze does as much work of expression as the pose itself.[4]

The original size and the monumental version

Rodin's first Thinker was about 70 centimetres high. The National Gallery of Art's cast in that scale measures 71.5 centimetres; the Metropolitan Museum of Art's measures 70.2 centimetres. These figures preserve the scale made for the top of the Gates.[5]

In 1903, Rodin had the figure enlarged. The monumental Paris bronze cast by the Alexis Rudier foundry in 1904 is 189 centimetres high, 98 centimetres wide, and 140 centimetres deep. Enlargement did more than make the statue easier to see outdoors. It magnified the ridges, depressions, and modelling marks, giving the tense surface a different public force.[6]

Why there is more than one real Thinker

Sculpture does not follow the same one-object logic as a painting. Rodin modelled forms in clay and plaster, assistants could enlarge or reduce them, and a foundry translated an approved model into bronze. The date of the model and the date of a particular cast are therefore different facts. A label such as 'modelled about 1880, cast about 1910' is not a contradiction.[4]

The National Gallery of Art reports more than fifty known casts in the original approximately 70-centimetre size. Monumental casts form another history. Under current French rules, an original bronze edition is limited to twelve numbered casts, including artist's copies; the Musée Rodin oversees editions from the models and molds Rodin left to the state. Museum-authorized casts, later reproductions, and unauthorized aftercasts should not be collapsed into one count.[5]

Where to see The Thinker in Paris

The monumental bronze most closely tied to Paris is in the sculpture garden of the Musée Rodin at the Hôtel Biron. It was cast by Alexis Rudier in 1904, offered to the City of Paris, and installed outside the Panthéon in 1906. It was transferred to the Musée Rodin in 1922. The museum warns that works can go on loan, so check the live object page before making a visit around one sculpture.[2]

A second monumental Thinker stands at the Musée Rodin's Meudon site on the shared tomb of Rodin and his wife, Rose Beuret. Legitimate casts in the smaller size also belong to museums including the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When asking where 'the original' is, the useful next question is which model, size, and cast date the museum means.[7]

More by Auguste Rodin

Sculpture · Modern sculptureThe Gates of HellConceived 1880–circa 1890; Paris bronze cast 1928Sculpture · Modern sculptureMonument to BalzacConceived 1898; Musée Rodin bronze cast by Alexis Rudier in 1935Sculpture · Modern sculptureThe Age of BronzeModelled 1876; Metropolitan Museum of Art cast about 1906Sculpture · Modern sculptureThe Burghers of CalaisModelled 1884–1895; Metropolitan Museum of Art cast 1985