The Thinker (1880–81): Art, History and Details

The Thinker (1880–81) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The Thinker was first developed as part of Rodin's The Gates of Hell, a sculptured doorway for a proposed museum of decorative arts in Paris. Intended to be part of a relief directly above the doors, the rugged figure was originally conceived as a generalized image of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), who wrote the Divine Comedy.

Object facts

• Title: The Thinker
• Date: 1880–81
• Creator attribution: Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: bronze
• Dimensions: Overall: 182.9 x 98.4 x 142.2 cm (72 x 38 3/4 x 56 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Sculpture 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1917.42

A detail from the museum

This enlarged version of The Thinker is one of less than 10 cast during Rodin's lifetime.

Collection credit

Gift of Ralph King

Further reading listed by the museum

• Rodin, Auguste, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Christina Buley-Uribe, Patrick R. Crowley, C. D. Dickerson, Laure de Margerie, Véronique Mattiussi, Elyse Nelson, Jennifer A. Thompson, and Nora M. Rosengarten. Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern. Williamstown, Massachusetts : Clark Art Institute, 2022.
• Margerie, Laure de, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Elisabeth Lyman, Miriam Rosen, Cole Swensen, and Susan Wise. French Sculpture: An American Passion. [Ghent] : Snoeck, 2023.
• "Rodin Memorial Exhibition." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 9 (1917): 162-63.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.