Musee Rodin

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Musee Rodin

Immediately east of Les Invalides is the Musee Rodin, on the corner of rue de Varenne, at no. 77 (daily except Mon: April-Sept 9.30am-5.45pm, garden closes at 6.45pm Oct0March 9.30am-4.45pm, garden closes at 5pm; €6, garden only €1. www.musee-rodin.fr;M° Varenne).The museum’s setting is superbly elegant, a beautiful eighteenth-century mansion which the sculptor leased from the state in return for the gift of all his work upon his death. Bronze versions of major projects like the Burghers of Calais, the thinker, the Gate of Hell and Ugolino and His Sons are exhibited in the garden – the latter froming the centrepiect of the ornamental pond.

Things get even better inside – the vigorous energy of the sculptures contrasting with the worn wooden paneling of the boisieries and the tarnished mirrors and chandeliers. It’s usually very crowded with visitors eager to see much-loved like the Hand of God and the kiss, which was originally designed to portray Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, from Dante’s Divine Comedy, in the moment before they were discovered and murdered by Francesca’s husband. Rodin once self-deprecatingly referred to it as “a large sculpted knick-knack following the usual formula”, art critics today like to think of it as the last masterwork of figurative sculpture before the whole art form was reinvented – largely by Rodin himself. Paris’s Kiss is one of only four marble versions of the work, nut hundreds of smaller bronzes were turned out as money-spinners.

It’s well worth lingering over the museum’s vibrant, impressionistic clay works, small studies that Rodin took from life. In fact, most of the works here are in completing his apprenticeship; he rarely picked up a chisel, in line with the common nineteenth-century practice of delegating the task of working up stone and bronze versions to assistance. Instead, he would return to his plaster casts again and again, modifying and refining them and sometimes deliberately leaving them "unfinished". On the ground floor, there’s a room devoted to Camille Claudel, Rodin’s pupil, model and lover. Among her works is the Age of Maturity, symbolizing her ultimate rejection by Rodin, and a bust of the artist himself. Claudel’s perception of her teacher was so akin to Rodin’s own that be considered it his self-portrait.

The rest of rue de Varnne and the parallel rue de Grenelle is full of aristocratic and ministerial mansions, including the Hôtel Mantignon, the prime minister’s well-guarded residence, with its giant garden stretching south as far as rue de Babylone. Overlooking the corner of rue Monsieur, at 57bis rue de Babylone, are the Chinese-style roofs of La Pagode, originally built as a fashionable toy for the wife of a director of the Bon Marche department store, and later turned into a historic cinema – in 1959 it premiered Cocteau’s Le Testament d’ Orphee. Following a superb renovation, it is now once again one of the most enjoyable art-house cinema venues in the city.

To the east, the area becomes steadily more human is scale, with increasing numbers of shops, apartment buildings and restaurants as you approach the Solferino, Rue de Bac and Sevres-Babylone metro stations. This eastern fringe of the 7e is covered in the section on St-Germain.