Auguste Rodin

Asked by the town of Calais in 1885 for a statue of one burgher, Rodin proposed all six hostages of 1347 as a single group for the same fee. The full-size plasters were shown in Paris in 1889, and the bronze monument was unveiled in Calais on 3 June 1895.

In 1880 the French State commissioned from Rodin a bronze door, The Gates of Hell, for a planned museum of decorative arts. He worked on it for years; the Musée Rodin counts more than 200 figures and groups made for it, many of which he later developed into independent works.

In 1916 Rodin donated his works, collections and reproduction rights to the French State to found a museum in the Hôtel Biron in Paris. The Musée Rodin opened to the public there in 1919, two years after his death.

Commissioned in 1891 to make a statue of Balzac within eighteen months, Rodin visited Touraine, studied portraits and descriptions of the novelist, and made series of nude and draped studies. In 1894 he accepted a new agreement without a deadline, writing that his only concern was to make the figure as perfect as possible; the plaster was exhibited in 1898, when the commissioning society refused it.

The years of studies and the deadline he gave up are consistent with this profile's high perfectionism score, which is marked as cutting both ways: the same documents record a strained relationship with his patrons. Perfectionism

His secretary Anthony Ludovici, writing from notes made in 1906, recalls that after seeing the Cambodian royal dancers perform in Paris that July, Rodin described their movements in detail. When the troupe left for Marseilles he followed them and spent several days there drawing the king and the dancers.

Travelling at sixty-five to draw an unfamiliar dance tradition offers one example of the curiosity scored in this profile, alongside his use of antiquities from his own collection in new works. Curiosity

When The Age of Bronze was shown at the 1877 Paris Salon, critics alleged that it had been cast from a living model. Rodin petitioned the fine-arts administration and supplied casts and photographs of his model for comparison; he was cleared only in 1880, after a group of established sculptors wrote on his behalf, and that year the State bought the work.

Pressing a three-year case while continuing to model new figures in a small shed sits alongside the persistence scored in this profile; the Musée Rodin also notes that the dispute drew attention to him, and the Gates of Hell commission followed in 1880. Persistence