House museums #74: Auguste Rodin

“You should, my dear great friend, come and see this beautiful building and the room that I have inhabited since this morning,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to the sculptor Auguste Rodin at the end of August 1908. “Its three bay windows look out prodigiously across an abandoned garden where from time to time one sees unsuspecting rabbits leap across trellises as if in an ancient tapestry.”

Rodin was, as anticipated, enchanted by his friend’s new lodgings in the Hôtel Biron, an exquisite, early 18th-century mansion with a storied past. Situated in the 7th arrondissement, the affluent heart of Paris, it was an extraordinary find — despite being somewhat dilapidated. Within weeks, Rodin had leased much of the ground floor and placed his sculptures throughout the wild, seven-acre garden.

Having survived the Revolution, the house had been a brothel, gambling den and dance hall, while the gardens hosted concerts and hot-air balloon rides. It was briefly home to the papal legate, then the Russian embassy, before being sold to the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which stripped the building of much of its finery and turned it into a convent school.

When the society dissolved in 1904, the building was divided into apartments while the receivers decided what to do. Among the lucky tenants who benefited from their dithering were the poet Jean Cocteau, the painter Henri Matisse (who ran an academy from a building in the garden), the dancer Isadora Duncan and the sculptor Clara Westhoff — Rilke’s wife.

By the time Rodin joined them, he was in his late sixties and one of the most celebrated artists of his day. He desired a Paris showroom, to impress collectors and critics, and a sanctuary where he could spend nights with his mistress of the moment, the Duchesse de Choiseul, away from his main home in the suburbs.

Taking advantage of the rooms’ airy, neoclassical proportions, he decorated simply: the main salon had a table, a bowl of fruit and a single painting by Renoir; others became drawing studios, with his watercolours lining the walls.

Rodin had not been there long, however, before the building was put up for sale and the occupants given notice. Terrified that it would be bought by a developer and demolished, the sculptor struck a bargain with the French state. He bequeathed the nation “all my works in plaster, marble, bronze and stone, and my drawings, as well as the collection of antiquities”, asking in return that these collections would be kept “in the Hôtel Biron, which will be the Musée Rodin, reserving the right to reside there all my life”.

Rodin died in 1917. Since 1919, all 22 rooms in the Hôtel Biron have housed nearly 300 works by Rodin and others in his personal collection — including those by Van Gogh, Renoir and Monet.

It is easy to see why he battled to stay. Daylight floods in from the south through grand windows that reach from floor to ceiling. Antique mirrors, marble fireplaces, intricate wooden panelling and parquet floors make an elegant stage for his sensuous, expressive sculptures — most famously “The Kiss” (c1882), which has been placed at the heart of the house.

Today, the bay windows give out on to gardens that have been snipped strictly into shape, organised around neat lawns, ornamental ponds, avenues of pollarded trees and, of course, Rodin’s own masterpieces such as “The Thinker” (1903) and “The Gates of Hell” (c1880-90). But while the wilderness has long been tamed, a trace remains. Rabbits can still be spotted, delighting in this unexpected, bucolic urban oasis.

musee-rodin.fr/en

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