Although Rodin is known primarily for his sculpture, he began with drawing, as all artists do. As a young man he nearly decided to pursue painting as his vocation, a consideration which is evidenced by his series of Belgian landscapes from the period of 1871 to 1877. After turning to sculpture, however, he nevertheless continued to draw, not only in the form of studies for paintings and sculptures, but also because, in the words of Judrin, “drawing was his true language. In his drawings he revealed his passing asides and ambiguous dreams to the eye of the connoisseur” (Judrin, “Rodin’s Drawings” 9). But it wasn’t until the 1890s that Rodin stopped viewing his drawings as the basis for other mediums of art and began to conceive them first and foremost as drawings.
During the last twenty years of his life, as mentioned before, Rodin went on a veritable “drawing spree,” during which he produced about eight thousand sketches (the majority of which are now housed in the Musée Rodin in Paris). Of the eight thousand, three-quarters are of women (Judrin, “Rodin’s Drawings” 10). In his catalogue Rodin: Drawings and Watercolors, Claudie Judrin, keeper at the Musée Rodin, divides these approximately six thousand drawings into four main themes: the symbolic drawings, eros and lesbos, dancing girls, and portraits of the model. 
We have already examined Rodin’s lesbian drawings, but, as Judrin notes, “in truth every drawing is an attempt to come closer to woman” (Judrin, “Rodin’s Drawings” 19). Thus, it would be well worth our time to consider the other ways in which women appear in Rodin’s myriad sketches. Here we will examine the symbolic sketches.
The theme of the symbolic woman includes four allegorical tropes: the cosmic, the mythological, the literary, and the religious. A woman appears as a cosmic symbol in Twilight (right), in which both her position and coloring combine to strike the balance between dark and light - the time of day known as twilight. She is sprawled on her side from left to right, her lower half sheathed in the approaching night, her upper half still illuminated with the remaining day. 
The dark pencil lines shrouding her legs and the circular lines arcing about her torso, as if to imitate the sun, subtly overshadow the lines that define her figure as a human body. Rodin dissolves her into the shadows and shapes of her imagery, recalling his erasure of definition in his depictions of lesbian couples.
In Orpheus (left), woman becomes a mythological symbol. The figure appears to be female, yet the title of the drawing suggests the myth’s male hero. If the figure is indeed meant to represent Orpheus, searching for his lover Eurydice, then it is with his symbolic language that Rodin blurs the boundaries between bodies, in this case male and female. Judrin points out that while Rodin invites sexual ambiguity in many of his drawings, his figures are “in fact always women” (Judrin, “Rodin’s Drawings” 13). 
This corresponds with our claim about Rodin’s lesbian couples that although his focus was indeed on the female body, a deeper look at the artistic evidence will reveal that he was more interested in the ambiguity and abstraction proffered by women’s bodies than in their actual sexuality.
Rodin explores literary symbolism in Nero (right). Here, while the drawing is named for the Roman emperor, the figure could conceivably be either male or female. There are no physical characteristics discernable to determine one way or the other - indeed, the figure almost fades completely into the stormy background of the paper, washed over with the same dark gray hue. 
In this example Rodin brings his fixation with dissolving figures to its ultimate expression, rendering the discriminations of sex unnecessary as he almost entirely melts Nero’s figure into the surroundings.
We witness the woman as a religious symbol in Guardian Angel (left), in which a woman lovingly regards a baby lying below her apparent aerial perch. In this case, the form of the woman does not so much dissolve as it does rearrange itself into multiple compositions. The legs of the woman rise up behind her, creating the illusion that she is floating on her stomach. However, her two legs arching up from her shoulder blades also become the tips of her wings, which cup down around her back and disappear. Here Rodin invites spatial ambiguity in a different way - instead of liquefying the lines until the forms bleed together, he composes them in such a way as to suggest multiple shape relationships, and thus multiple readings of the drawing.
In examining Rodin’s symbolic drawings, it becomes clear how Rodin’s interest in manipulating the female figure was not only reserved for his lesbian couples. In many of his drawings, as we discover, Rodin maneuvered the lines, shadows, and washes to constantly challenge us to question whether what we see is actually what we see. “In the course of thousands of drawings,” Judrin declares, “Rodin sketched and brought to life a new Eve, always the same” (Judrin, “Rodin’s Drawings” 12). But in fact, as we’ve seen, she was never the same, because she was continually melting away into some other amorphous shape of Rodin’s imagination.
top: Auguste Rodin. Photograph. “Auguste Rodin.” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia. Janurary 2006. http://encarta.msn.com