A Fortunate Event

To see why Rodin’s art would contain a sense of Impressionism rather than strictly adhering to academic guidelines, we should turn to the early part of his life, in which he trained - but failed as - a true academic artist. Born rather poor in mid-nineteenth century Paris, Rodin as a child did not enjoy the copious advantages in artistic training his more well-to-do contemporaries benefited from. Instead, with his decidedly raw artistic talent, Rodin enrolled in the Petite Ecole, a free art school where he copied classical art from the Louvre and learned the traditional techniques of artists at the time. He also began, for the first time, to take classes in history and read classics such as Homer, Virgil, and Dante to strengthen his knowledge of the classical subject matter that he was to sculpt. (Lampert, 3). However, Rodin thrice failed at entering the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the prestigious state-run art school, which meant that he would eventually become an apprentice, laboring in the workshops of other artists rather than enjoying a professional career and sponsorship by the state. In time, he would find that this rejection was a fortunate event in his life, as instead of being fully trained and indoctrinated into the conventions of the Academy of France, Rodin was somewhat removed from the “official” art world and free to experiment with artwork that interested him (Tancock, 19). As such, the next twenty years as an apprentice working for other sculptors allowed Rodin to develop a style all of his own: an infusion of the classical tradition in which he was well schooled with what he would concentrate more and more on in his sculptures as his career progressed: the dynamic poses of his figures.