Auguste Rodin’s Penseur has become one of the most recognizable sculptures in art history. The works pertinence to Rodin's contemporaries was immediate and its continued relevance in today's visual culture has solidified the sculpture's legacy. Though he firmly grounded Le Penseur in intellectual history, Rodin transcended preceding imagery to create a true masterpiece that continues to transfix contemporary society.

Rodin first conceived of the model in 1880-81 to crown the tympanum of his monumental La Porte de l'Enfer (see fig. 1). The figure was intended to represent Dante, surrounded by the characters of his Divine Comedy, but soon took on an independent life. "Thin and ascetic in his straight gown," Rodin wrote later, "my Dante would have been meaningless once divorced from the overall work. Guided by my initial inspiration, I conceived another "thinker", a nude, crouching on a rock, his feet tense. Fists tucked under his chin, he muses. Fertile thoughts grow slowly in his mind. He is no longer a dreamer. He is a creator" (quoted in R. Masson & V. Mattiussi, Rodin, Paris, 2004, p. 38). Transcending Dante's narrative, the Penseur became a universal symbol of reflection and creative genius which has retained its hold on the popular imagination.

Such an important figure comes with an equally impressive provenance. The present cast was commissioned from the Musée Rodin in Paris by Jules E. Mastbaum in 1925. Having visited the Parisian museum just a year before commissioning the present cast, Mastbaum quickly became enamored of the artist’s work and soon went on to found The Rodin Museum in his hometown of Philadelphia. The Mastbaum name has since become synonymous with Rodin’s oeuvre and the great history of American collectors. It was Jules Mastbaum who commissioned the first two bronze castings of Rodin’s magnum opus—his Gates of Hell—which Penseur crowns. Executed during Rodin’s lifetime only in plaster which was kept at Rodin’s studio in Meudon, Mastbaum’s two casts would enter the collections of the Rodin Museum, Philadelphia and the Musée Rodin, Paris in the 1920s (see fig. 2). The present cast of Penseur, dating to the same period of Mastbaum’s commissioning of the Gates of Hell, has remained in the Mastbaum family collection since its execution and comes to auction for the very first time.

Rodin conceived Le Penseur to be the apex, both structurally and philosophically, of his Gates of Hell. As Camille Mauclair noted in 1898, "All the sculptural radiance ends in this ideal center. This prophetic statue can carry in itself the attributes of the author of the Divine Comedy, but it is still more completely the representation of Penseur. Freed of clothing that would have made it a slave to a fixed time, it is nothing more than the image of the reflection of man on things human. It is the perpetual dreamer who perceives the future in the facts of the past, without abstracting himself from the noisy life around him and in which he participates..." (Camille Mauclair, "L'Art de M. Rodin," La Revue des Revues, 18 June 1898).

The form of Le Penseur relies upon a historical lineage traceable to Albrecht Dürer’s influential etching, Melancolia (fig. 3). Contained within this figural gesture – tilted head resting upon raised hand – were implications of introversion, philosophical crisis and intellectual profundity. Michelangelo relied upon a similar form for his personification of Lorenzo de Medici (fig. 4) and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux would give the gesture a dark turn in his masterwork of 1865-67 (fig. 5). The allegorical force of this gesture was undeniable by the time Rodin conceived Le Penseur in 1880. Rodin strips away the narrative and specificity that permeated these earlier examples, rendering his sculpture with a clear humanist vision.

From at least 1888, when the sculpture was first exhibited in Copenhagen, Rodin considered Penseur to be an autonomous composition. The following year it was shown in Paris, with the original title Dante revised to read Le Penseur: le poète. The work's effect on critics and viewers was immediate and potent, allowing it to transcend the larger scheme of La Porte de l'Enfer. Artists such as Edward Steichen and Edvard Munch worked through a hypnotic attachment to the model (see figs. 6 and 7). Writer and critic Gabriel Mourey wrote of the work in 1906, “he is no longer the poet suspended over the pit of sin and expiation; he is our brother in suffering, curiosity, contemplation, joy, the bitter joy of searching and knowing. He is no longer a superhuman, a predestined human being; he is simply a man for all ages, for all latitudes” (“Le Penseur de Rodin offert par souscription publique au people de Paris,” Les Arts de la vie, vol. 1, no. 5 (May, 1904), p. 268).