Works by Auguste Rodin

Known for The Thinker and The Kiss, the sculptor Auguste Rodin also left thousands of drawings and prints, among them nudes drawn in loose, looping pencil lines with a wash of watercolour over the body.

Rodin learned to draw in Paris under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who taught pupils to work from memory. Refused three times by the École des Beaux-Arts, he spent most of two decades making ornament for a living. In 1880 he was commissioned to make The Gates of Hell, a portal of figures from Dante's Inferno that he worked on for the rest of his life, and from that decade comes The Witches' Sabbath, gouache and ink so dark that one pale shape glows out of it.

The Musée Rodin holds just thirteen drypoints by him, against some 7,000 drawings and prints. In Love Turning the World, from 1881, a crowd of plump children, one of them winged, shove a huge globe along a bank of cloud.

Later in life he turned more and more to the female body, often drawn loosely without the pencil leaving the paper or his eyes leaving the model. In Sphinx a woman stands with folded arms inside a cloud of pencil loops, her body filled with brown wash; he had first scored her outline into the paper, and a note at her side reads "noir draperie". Several lithographs of 1899–1900 take French sentences as titles, and in one a woman smooths her long red hair, as its line about Clara says. Nearly all the works below are drawings and prints rather than sculpture, mostly of the human figure, women far more often than men.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, J. Paul Getty Museum, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Art Institute of Chicago.