The eighties was also the decade of The Burghers of Calais, probably Rodin's most satisfactory and successful public monument. It was in connection with these portraits that critics began to describe him as a great artist, perhaps even the best young sculptor in modern France. He created a series of brilliant realistic portraits which he showed in the Salons of the 1880s. The title, "The Gates of Hell," was one that began to appear in the writing of several critics around 1886-1889.The figures for the doors were far from being the extent of Rodin's activity in the eighties. It was the time when he modeled the majority of the figures for his "doors," as he called them. The decade of the 1880s, when Rodin was in his forties, was the most intense and productive of his entire life. It was the canvas across which would pass the totality of his imagination it was the surface from which he would draw the creations of an entire career. The museum was never built and the door was never cast in Rodin's lifetime, but The Gates of Hell-as we now call it-was Rodin most important work. Turquet offered his strange commission to Rodin. One of his most unusual ideas was to commission a bronze door for the Musée des Arts Décoratifs-unusual because no such museum existed, although there was much talk about creating one. Turquet was ambitious and hoped to be the commissioner for many public works of art. One man who admired it unreservedly, however, was Edmund Turquet, a liberal politician serving in the Chambre des Députés, who, in 1879 became Undersecretary of State for fine arts. The Age of Bronze was a controversial figure, mostly because it looked so close to life that critics raised the question if it might not be a cast from life. It is Rodin's first recognized masterpiece. It became his ticket back to Paris, where it was accepted for the Salon of 1877 under the title The Age of Bronze. The following winter Rodin exhibited this figure in plaster in the rooms of the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in Brussels, calling it Le Vainçu ( The Vanquished One). There he would study the figures of antiquity, of Donatello, and especially those of Michelangelo. His desire to understand the beautiful male body combined with his ambition to create an outstanding work that would establish his reputation led Rodin to embark on a month-long trip to Italy between February and March 1876. Rodin's most notable single figure of his Brussels period, however, was the one he undertook on his own in 1875. The work with Van Rasbourgh developed into a real partnership, with Rodin as the primary administrator responsible for the day-to-day operations of a studio from which some fine public commissions were brought to completion between 18. Although his employ with Carrier-Belleuse soon ended, he found a Belgian partner, Joseph Van Rasbourgh (1831-1902), with whom he was able to continue working at the Bourse. Rodin's Brussels residency began in March 1871. Fortunately for Rodin, Carrier-Belleuse had a major commission in Brussels, where the city was building a new Bourse. The war created a situation in which sculptors could hardly hope to find work in Paris. It was a period marked by struggle, discontent, and poverty, only brought to an end by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. In the same year she gave birth to their only son, Auguste Beuret. In 1864 he began living with Rose Beuret, who became his lifelong companion. During this period of ill-starred beginnings, when Rodin was in his twenties, he also assumed family responsibilities. Although he was engaged in the studio of Albert Carrier-Belleuse (1824-1887), one of the most visible and productive sculptors in Paris during the Second Empire, Rodin remained quite poor and though he produced a work in 1863-1864, The Man with the Broken Nose, that he considered an excellent work of sculpture, surely worthy of entry to the Salon, twice it was refused. Having failed to enter the elite track, a solitary Rodin plied two paths, one to pay his bills, the other to bring him to the attention of the great world of art in Paris. He entered the competition for admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts three times, but each time met with failure. In the course of his studies, young Rodin articulated larger goals for himself, specifically to become a sculptor. At age thirteen, however, Rodin decided to enroll in the Ecole Spèciale de Dessin et de Mathématique, a school with the mission to educate the designers and the artisans of the French nation. Nothing in his family background or situation suggested that he might become an artist. Auguste Rodin was born in 1840, the second child and only son of Jean-Baptiste Rodin and Marie Cheffer, first-generation Parisians of modest means.
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