The purpose of this research is to examine the life and work of French sculptor August Rodin (1840-1917). The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the historical and cultural context in which Rodin's work emerged in the Western world, and then to discuss, with reference to his family background and education, the cultural milieu in which he operated, and his major works where he may be most appropriately positioned in the history of art and the degree and kind of significance that his life and work appear to have achieved.
In order to discuss the life and work of Rodin from a proper perspective, it is useful and necessary to realize that his life spanned a watershed period of transformation in the history of Western civilization in general and art in particular. Philosophically, politically, materially, and artistically, Western Europe in 1840 was vastly different from Western Europe in 1917. When it is realized that Rodin's professional career not only was an aspect of the transformation of Europe during that period but also helped to shape the cultural aspect of that transformation, then the significance of Rodin can also be more justly measured. Consider for example the fact that the Europe of the 1840s was most markedly the post-Napoleonic world, especially in the case of France. The rigidity of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 sought to freeze European society for all time, though the rise of the bourgeoisie from the ranks of the middle class, together with the Industrial Revolution and urbanization on one hand and philosophical Romanticism on the other, ensured that the preoccupations of society extended from the preferences of the aristocracy and toward wider concerns. Thus such concepts as individual human liberty, nationalism, the Romantic cult of benevolent nature, the consciousness of economic and class differences, and the inevitable praise of social revolution as an ideal increasingly surfaced...